Why Panto exists
In 2024, I did an Interrail trip across 25 countries in Europe. For every leg, whether a TGV in France, a regional train in Bulgaria, or a night train through Austria, the only tool I had was a static timetable app. No live data. No alerts. No intelligence of any kind.
Twenty-five countries of rail infrastructure, and not a single app watching any of it in real time.
The pattern I kept hitting
Every rail app I tried was a booking tool with a delay badge bolted on. The big booking apps show you a number. The carrier's own app shows you a platform. Neither one is actually watching your train. Neither tells you anything you didn't already go looking for yourself.
Meanwhile, across the roughly 8.7 billion rail journeys taken in Europe every year, the same small failures keep happening: platforms change at the last minute and passengers find out at the barrier, trains run late upstream and nobody says anything before you've already left home, connections get tight and the app that sold you the ticket has no idea.
The information exists somewhere in an operator's system. It just never reaches the person who needs it, at the moment they need it.
Why nobody had built it
Aggregating real-time data from dozens of European rail operators, across incompatible formats and APIs, is genuinely hard. Booking apps don't bother because their business is selling tickets, not watching them after the sale. Carrier apps only ever cover their own network: DB Navigator gets you real-time data in Germany and a few neighbouring countries, but it goes quiet the moment you're further afield. Maps apps route you from A to B; they don't stay with you once you're on board.
Panto is my answer to that gap: one app that connects directly to live data from dozens of European rail operators, merges it into a single map, a single passport of your trips, and one consistent set of alerts, no matter which country or which operator you're on.
It's still early, and it's rail, and only rail.