I think I first heard about the verification quizbot at a journalism conference earlier this summer. It’s a twitter account run by a group of open-source investigation and verification people who post challenges every day. I remember thinking to myself that it sounded like a great and fun way to start practicing google dorking, reverse image searching, time machine-ing and more which i had read but not practiced.
It took me a few more months before I actually landed on the page — but now I love it! After almost ditching it again (because I didn’t understand how others were able to figure out that what looked like a red monitor standing in a hallway to me actually was a dutch mailbox) I did end up spending a very late evening with an easier reverse image searching challenge first and then giving the challenge above a go.
And to my own very big surprise I actually managed to geo-locate it!
Here is how:
- Looking at the video more closely.
The building with the orange and brown stripes seemed quite distinct and I tried reverse image-searching and googling it, but without any success.
Also, the is an “S” sign that’s being passed, which I found out the German “S-Bahn” uses. Also, the signposts (for track numbers) of the train station passed seemed to match the German design, and with some imagination there is a “Deutsche Post” logo on a house we pass. So first guess: we’re somewhere in Germany.
2. Searching the person who posted the video. He stated that the video was taken on Sept 24th and it was easy to find another post of his from that day, in which he claimed to be on a train from Frankfurt to Berlin at around 7.45pm. The interior from the photo shows an ICE train (by Deutsche Bahn), but they run almost hourly between the two cities and I couldn’t find any more specific visual clues in the photo from the ICE, so it remained unclear which train he took. However, I found another clue in the video: You can see a bike icon reflecting on the window, and the “Deutsche Bahn” which runs all ICE trains, uses different iconography (and I don’t think they have any bike compartments on ICE trains anyways), so I decided to go with the assumption that the short video was taken on some other train on his way to Frankfurt (where he would then catch the train to Berlin).
3. Okay, now this was getting more serious. I wanted to be able to look at the video frame by frame. Since downloading video from twitter is not an option, I recorded my screen while watching the video on full-screen once, which gave me a high-resolution file of the video to further play with.
4. I imported the video to Photoshop, which extracts the video frames as separate layers or image files if you want. I looked at all of them again, trying to find a clearer shot of the bike icon and that something that was written below it. I tried obtaining a clearer image by overlapping and multiplying different frames, which didn’t really work. I tried reverse image-searching a shot of the icon, which did not work at all, either. Then i luckily found one frame of the video, where I could read what was written below the bike icon: “max 12”.
I tried googling, again without any new insight (I probably tried googling something like train+bike+”max 12", maybe +frankfurt).
5. As I knew that Deutsche Bahn, the main German train company, didn’t use this icon representation for bikes, I looked up what other railway companies there are. I thought it would have been only be a handful — turns out there are loads all over Germany, though. Fortunately there is a website that lists all private railway companies for the federal state of Hessen only (which is where Frankfurt is) and on that list it’s really just a handful. I decided to start researching the companies that have trains running through Frankfurt first, and would have expanded the research to trains running elsewhere in the state later if I didn’t find anything.
6. Who knew that there is a huge community platform for train shots?! I didn’t. Now I do. Loads of train enthusiasts take high-res pictures, post them on Bahnbilder.de and tag them super accurately with place, train company, model etc, making it a fantastic research resource! Eventually I came across this image (and other similar ones) featuring a train run by the “vlexx” company, which shows the exact bike icon I found in the video:
I did check photos for the other companies that run trains to Frankfurt, too, to check if any of them carried a similar icon, but they didn’t. Of course it would have still been possible that the video was taken somewhere further away from Frankfurt on one of the trains I had decided not to include in this first round, but regardless I went ahead with this find and could have revisited, if I had hit a dead end.
7. I found a map of the routes served by vlexx trains; and because there was the “S-Bahn” signpost we passed in the video, it had to be at a station served by the (local) S-Bahn network aswell. I checked whether any of the close-by cities had S-Bahns aswell (Mainz or Wiesbaden) but they didn’t (great! less stations to check!). So here are maps of the S-Bahn routes and the vlexx routes, and then it was just a matter of checking all the stations which were passed by both.
8. Google maps satellite 3D-view! At this point it was just a matter of doing the work, really. I didn’t find any more intelligent way than typing in station after station and looking for these landmarks which I had identified on the video:
- a street running orthogonal below the train tracks
- arched bike parking shelters
- that higher building with the orange stripe
- a house right by the train tracks with a terrace and presumably a kiosk, presumably with a Deutsche Post / DHL branch.
…of course I decided to check out the train stations in an order which happened to leave the right one just until the end… but finally I found it! Kelsterbach!
Give it a go if you’re curious! It’s really fun, and hugely encouraging to see how much you can figure out from just in front of your computer in a few hours (yes, I did end up spending hours with this. Oops.)
Enjoy!