AshlyVuba/South-African-RailWaze

Geekulcha Annual Hack # South African RailWaze **Team:** TheLastCodeBenders **Event:** Geekulcha Annual Hackathon 2026 (25–27 September 2026, Centurion, #GKHack26) **Challenge track:** Train Journey Mapper **Corridor:** Pretoria → Cape Town (1,600 km) ## What it is South African RailWaze turns the 26-hour Pretoria–Cape Town rail journey into an interactive, offline-capable travel companion. Instead of staring at empty Karoo landscape for a day, passengers get a live 3D map of the terrain they're crossing, geofenced audio stories about the towns they're passing, a "then vs. now" photo archive of historic stations, and a lightweight passport game that rewards them for reaching waypoints. The core idea: one unified viewport, not a set of disconnected app tabs. As the train moves along the route, the map layer updates in real time and three contextual panels — audio, archive, passport — surface automatically based on where the train is. South African RailWaze is TheLastCodeBenders' submission to the Train Journey Mapper track of the Geekulcha Annual Hackathon 2026, built to the 2026 theme, **Build for use**: a solution with identified users, a validated problem, security-by-design, and a real go-to-market plan, ready to be used beyond demo day. The track itself is also positioned as a foundation for Geekulcha's follow-on Train Tourism Hackathon in 2027. ## Problem - **In-transit disconnection** — over a day of travel with little interpretation of the landscape passing by. - **Rural tourism invisibility** — small heritage towns along the line (De Aar, Matjiesfontein, etc.) have no digital discoverability. - **Cultural and historical erasure** — regional folklore and railway history isn't documented anywhere accessible. - **Low connectivity** — long dead zones across the Karoo break cloud-dependent travel apps. ## Core features | Feature | Description | |---|---| | 3D scenic railsurface map | Real-time topographic map tracking elevation, biome shifts, and day/night cycles as the train …