We're left depending on the few people who have the time/energy/money to produce labors of love and charities like this. Beyond that, we're left with centralized superplatforms.
At least the rail companies are starting to care for their websites nowadays, at least in Europe. In Spain I've heard the running insult-joke when some other fellow programmer will ask you about your experience only to get back to you saying "nah... I know you. You're the guy who made the Renfe website" (Renfe is the Spanish state rail company, and their website is... not great.)
I have the same feeling. But, my guess it that it’s not that those sites don’t exist. It’s more about finding these gems. Content-free sales pages have been search engine optimized the last years. So the SERPs are full of commercial shit. We need better exploration possibilities. That’s one of the reasons I love HN.
To be fair, based on my searches, "Get from x to y by train"-type searches tend to feature this site on the first page of results -- that's how I found it originally. So something in the Google algorithm clearly values this type of content-rich, no-frills site.
I kinda want one of these directory websites you could find in the early 2000s that were just collections of websites the author liked. I want a page like that just filled with links to pushed like this. projectrho.com comes to mind as another page I would want to see liked there.
