About railnest
railnest lists places to sleep and spend the day within a five-minute walk of a railway station. Nothing further away. That is the whole idea.
Why five minutes
Arriving by night train at half past six in the morning, or reaching a city at midnight with a connection at dawn, is a particular kind of tired. What matters then is not the star rating. It is whether you can get there without a taxi, a map, or a decision.
Five minutes on foot is roughly four hundred metres. Far enough to have real choice in most cities, close enough that you can see where you are going when you step out of the hall.
How we measure
Every walking time on this site is routed along real footpaths — pavements, crossings, underpasses. Never a straight line with a factor applied to it.
The difference is not academic. A hotel two hundred metres away across six tracks can be a fifteen-minute walk. A straight-line estimate would put it at three minutes and send you the wrong way at six in the morning.
Where we cannot route a real path, we do not guess. The entry stays out.
Where the information comes from
Stations come from rail.world, our own database of railway stations. Hotels, hostels, day rooms, luggage storage, showers, lounges and coworking spaces come from OpenStreetMap, built by people who mapped their own towns.
Pages marked found automatically have been compiled by machine and not yet read by a person. Pages marked checked by railnest have. We say which is which on every page, because the difference matters and hiding it would be a small lie repeated thousands of times.
How railnest is paid for
Some links to booking sites earn us a commission. That costs you nothing, and it does not change what appears on a page or in which order.
The order is walking time, shortest first. Always. There is no paid placement and there will not be one — the moment a page can be bought, the five minutes stop meaning anything.
Where a place has its own website, we link to it first. Booking direct is often cheaper, and pointing that out costs us a commission, not our credibility.
Who is behind it
railnest is made by Railworld AB in Älmhult, Sweden — the same small operation behind rail.world and nachtzug.net. It is not a startup, and there is no investor waiting for growth.
That has a consequence worth naming: we work through the world's stations one batch at a time. If yours has no entries yet, it has not been surveyed yet, and the page says so rather than pretending to be empty.