GRAOU : l’application qui simplifie la vie des cheminots français

After sixteen years at the helm of the Alsatian trains, Nicolas Wurtz is now making his former colleagues happy. Thanks to his popular GRAOU website, French railway workers see their job completely simplified. Explanations.

Not all heroes wear capes, he prefers large Excel files to facilitate the daily lives of thousands of train professionals. As a TER driver, Nicolas Wurtz decided in 2014 to create GRAOU, a website that meets the needs of his former colleagues.

The Strasbourg resident starts from a simple observation, random schedules and scattered information compromise the family life of the agents. To “simplify the daily life of those on the move”, he gathers all the data provided freely by railway companies and makes it accessible for free.

More recently, the application has expanded to include passengers, with a real-time map that allows tracking of any train in France.

A programming enthusiast since the age of 8, Nicolas Wurtz now allows 26,000 professionals to save time, a lot of time, but also to strengthen their social ties.

He only needed three months to develop a tool that is now indispensable for professionals. When it was launched 9 years ago, the application had 50 registered users. Quickly, thanks to word of mouth, his project spread throughout France.

“It allows them to organize themselves at work and outside. Before, drivers had to log in complexly to an internal network to check their schedules, with the app, everything is centralized with one click,” he explains.

But GRAOU’s greatest strength remains its friendly aspect. Users can follow their colleagues’ journeys in real-time and coordinate with them during or after their shifts. An instant messaging feature facilitates communication between them and enhances the “social” aspect of the application.

A musician in his spare time, the forty-year-old dedicates a large part of his days to GRAOU. It must be said that the need for maintenance is significant. Every day, the app reaches nearly one million views, a statistic that is dizzying. Yet, Nicolas Wurtz has never made a penny from his creation and has no plans to change that. “I come from a time when the internet was open, decentralized. I come from the world of free software and I advocate for keeping it that way. I don’t want ads on my site,” he says.

In the meantime, before potentially being bought by a large group, the Strasbourg resident wants to be useful to society, always with the same credo of putting “humans at the center” of his projects.

In this spirit, he launched an extension of GRAOU in 2021, this time targeting the general public. It is a collaborative and playful map that allows tracking of all trains currently in circulation, much to the delight of train enthusiasts. “SNCF Réseau produced 99 data sets on infrastructure. The lines, tracks, and level crossings are accessible to everyone. I wanted to centralize everything and saw that it worked well. I coded it in two weeks and decided to make it public.”

But Nicolas Wurtz doesn’t plan to stop there. As a data enthusiast, the Alsatian has some application ideas in the back of his mind, with the intention of always designing projects that serve the “public interest”.