Repat Planner Guide

A single-file web page for planning repatriation runs from the coroner (46 Moore St, Southbank) to country funeral directors, finishing at Notting Hill. Start and Finish are filled in for you; you give it the towns you're delivering to. It works out the route, picks rest, fuel and meal stops roughly every 200 km in towns that actually have services, and builds a live trip sheet:

• a drop-down of the funeral directors in each destination town, from your own list (add them one at a time, or import a spreadsheet). Pick one and the route goes to its door.
• fuel stops only at stations that take the Shell Card, and every Shell Card station along the route highlighted on the map
• arrival and departure times in each stop's own time zone, including daylight saving
• planned fuel stops
• sunrise and sunset, with after-dark and dusk warnings
• forecast weather for each arrival
• totals for each driving day

Every change you make on the sheet updates everything below it straight away. The sheet can be copied into Google Sheets or Excel, or downloaded as CSV.

The planner comes as two files:

• index.html: the planner itself. Everything it needs is in this one file.
• README.html: this guide.

Getting started

1. Unzip both files into the same folder, anywhere on your computer. Keep them together.
2. Open index.html directly in Chrome or Edge: double-click it, or drag it into a browser window.
3. On the very first open, it plans an example run so you can see how it works: the coroner → Horsham → Notting Hill, leaving 08:00 tomorrow.
4. Add your funeral directors with Funeral directors list in the Trip panel (one at a time, or import a CSV list). Then choose the one under Horsham in the trip sheet, and the trip is planned again to that address.
5. The How it works (README) link in the green header, and the one in the footer, open this guide in a new tab. That's why the two files need to be in the same folder.

Don't open it inside another app's file preview pane. Preview panes block internet lookups, and the page will say so.

You need an internet connection. There are no accounts, keys or installs.

The Repat Planner keeps its saved plan and remembered results separately from the Bike Trip Planner, so the two can be used on the same computer without affecting each other.

The Trip panel

Press Plan trip after changing the start, vias or finish. Every other setting updates the sheet as soon as you change it.

Clear trip (next to Plan trip) starts a new run. Click it twice to confirm; the second click must come within 4 seconds. It removes the current trip, including the sheet, map, edits, weather and the funeral directors you chose, empties Via, and puts Start and Finish back to Coroner and Notting Hill. It keeps your settings, your funeral director list, and the remembered place results, fuel hours and fuel brands. If you might want the trip again, use Save plan first.

Funeral directors

Funeral directors come only from your own list. Nothing is taken from the map data: only funeral directors you've added are shown on the map or offered in the drop-downs.

Your list

• Open it with Funeral directors list in the Trip panel, or + add funeral director under a destination town in the trip sheet (the town is filled in for you).
• Add one: enter the name, street address, town and phone, press Find on map, check the green "Found:" line is the right place, then Save. If the address isn't found, or lands in the wrong spot, paste the latitude and longitude instead: in Google Maps, right-click the building and click the numbers at the top of the menu to copy them, e.g. -36.7180, 142.2010.
• Edit or delete from the list underneath. Changing the street or town clears the old map position, and Save finds the new one. If you edit a funeral director chosen for the current trip, the trip is re-routed to the new spot.
• Import list… loads a whole list from a CSV file (in Excel: File → Save As → CSV). The first row should name the columns: Name, Street address, Town, Phone, and optionally Latitude and Longitude. A single Address column like 40 Baillie Street, Horsham VIC 3400 also works. An entry with the same name and town as one already in your list updates it; the rest are added. Each address is then found on the map, one at a time. Any that can't be found show Not located: edit them to fix the address or paste coordinates. Until then they show in the drop-down but can't be chosen.
• Export list saves the list as funeral-directors.csv, which opens in Excel and can be imported again.

Where the list is kept. On the Cloudflare Pages site set up as below, the list is shared: it's stored on the server, everyone using the site sees the same list on any device, and changes need the passphrase (asked for once, then remembered in that browser; Forget passphrase in the window removes it). Opened from a file instead, the list is kept in that browser only: clearing the browser's site data removes it, and another computer won't have it. Either way, Export list now and then makes a backup.

If you'd added funeral directors in a browser before the shared list was set up, the window offers Copy this browser's own list into the shared list.

If the shared list can't be reached, the last copy seen in that browser is shown and can still be used for trips, but it can't be changed until the server is back.

Choosing one for a trip

• Under each destination town in the trip sheet, a drop-down lists your funeral directors whose town matches, or that are within 10 km of the town centre, nearest first, with address and distance.
• Choosing one plans the trip again, routed to that funeral director instead of the town centre. The stop is renamed (e.g. "Wimmera Funerals, Horsham"), and its address and phone show in the grey line underneath and in the CSV. Choose Town centre to go back. Planning again also resets that run's edits on the sheet, so choose the funeral directors before editing.
• They also show on the map as purple FD squares. Click one and press Deliver here to choose it. The chosen one is drawn larger.
• Until a funeral director is chosen for a town, a red note above the sheet says the route ends at the town centre.

Your choices for a trip are kept with the plan and in a saved plan file, but not after Clear trip, so a new trip never starts with a funeral director chosen for an earlier one. If you delete a funeral director that's chosen for the current trip, it disappears from the drop-down and a red note says the route still goes there: choose another, or press Plan trip to go to the town centre. Always confirm the delivery address against the paperwork.

Shell Card stations

After a trip is planned, the planner finds every fuel station within 10 km of the whole route, then highlights the ones that take the Shell Card:

Only stations within the Shell Card stations within setting are shown. Click a pin for its name, brand, opening hours (when known), how far along and off the route it is, and an Add as stop button (one for each time the route passes it, e.g. on the way out and the way back).

Fuel stops are only ever planned at stations that take the Shell Card (the yellow-pin brands: Shell, Reddy Express / Coles Express, OTR). Other servos, including Liberty, Westside and Mogas, can still be rest stops, but the sheet doesn't count them as fuel. On the trip sheet, a stop with a Shell Card station shows Shell Card fuel (OTR 24 hrs) in the grey line, and the FUEL button offers a fill there; a stop without one shows no fuel. If no Shell Card station is within your fuel range, the sheet says so in red. You can still click no fuel to plan a fill there by hand. The green header shows how many Shell Card stations are within the map setting, and the CSV has a Shell Card column.

How a station's brand is known: its brand in OpenStreetMap, looked up for every station found along the route; otherwise its name (most are named after their brand, e.g. "Shell Ararat"). Matching is by whole word, so "Shellharbour" is not taken for Shell. A station with neither a brand nor a brand-like name recorded won't be highlighted or used for fuel, even if it does take the card; use Add as stop and click its FUEL button if you know it does. In the busiest parts of Melbourne, stations more than about 2 km from the route may be missed.

The list of brands comes from Shell and the trucking press (Shell: What's a fuel card; Big Rigs, 11 Nov 2024). Networks change, so check Shell's own station locator if in doubt.

The search runs when you press Plan trip, before the stops are chosen, so planning takes a little longer than before. If it fails, stops are still chosen, judging stations by their names only, and the status line says so.

The trip sheet

Each row is a stop. The numbers on a row describe the leg that arrives at that stop.

Overnight stops

A stop of 5 hours or more is an overnight and takes two shaded lines: the arrival line (with an Overnight · 11 h 34 min stay label, that evening's sunset and the weather on arrival) and the leave line (the departure time, the next morning's sunrise, the forecast for leaving, and Leave in dark or Leave at dawn/dusk if it applies). A green line under the pair marks the end of the driving day.

Below the table, one day card per driving day shows the distance, driving time, stop time, leave and arrive times, total time on the road, and any dark or dusk legs. The green header shows the totals for the whole trip.

On the map

• The route is the green line.
• Numbered pins are the stops; square pins are your start, vias and finish.
• Yellow SC pins are Shell Card stations; white dashed ones are check-first brands.
• Purple FD squares are the funeral directors in your destination towns.
• Small dots are other places with services that were found. Amber dots have fuel; click one to Add as stop.
• Use the switch at the top right to change between Roads, Topographic and Satellite, and to hide the Shell Card or funeral director pins.

Buttons

• Refresh weather: fetch the latest forecasts. It also retries fuel opening hours and the Shell Card search if either failed.
• Copy for Sheets: copy the sheet, then paste it into Google Sheets or Excel.
• Download CSV: the sheet as a CSV file, named after the first destination (e.g. repat_2026-10-06_Horsham_VIC.csv). The columns are Flag, Location, Km, Speed, Stop, Hours, Arrive, Depart, State, Notes, then Total km, Since fuel, weather, sunrise, sunset, light, the fuel stations' opening hours, whether fuel is open when you arrive, the length of an overnight stay, the light when you leave, Shell Card, Funeral director address and Funeral director phone.
• Save plan / Open plan: save the whole plan, including your edits and chosen funeral directors, to a .json file, and open it again later.

How it works

Route

With Sealed roads only ticked, the route comes from the public Valhalla server (the routing engine on the OpenStreetMap website), using its car profile set to avoid unsealed roads. An unsealed road is only used right at the start or finish, for example a gravel driveway. This relies on roads being marked as sealed or unsealed in OpenStreetMap; check remote sections on the Satellite map.

The public Valhalla server won't take a single request covering more than 1,500 km, so the planner asks for the route one leg at a time, splitting any leg longer than that.

If Valhalla can't be reached or can't find a sealed route, the planner uses OSRM instead and says so in red. With the box unticked, OSRM is always used.

Choosing stops

1. Jump the stop spacing (e.g. 200 km) along the route from the last stop.
2. Search 25 km either side of that point for towns and roadhouses with fuel, food or a store.
3. If there's nothing, widen the search step by step.
4. Score each place and pick the best. Places closer to the target distance score better. Bigger towns, places with food, and places with fuel when the tank is getting low get a bonus. Places that would leave you short of fuel are avoided.
5. Repeat from the chosen stop until the next via or the finish is within about 1.3 × the spacing.

Fuel stops

Fills are only planned at stations that take the Shell Card. "Fuel" in the rules below means a Shell Card station.

1. Never drive further than your fuel range between fills, where the map has fuel that makes this possible.
2. Fill at the end of each day, at the overnight stop or the closest stop with fuel before it, so you start the next morning full.
3. Use as few fills as possible.
4. Spread the fills as evenly as possible across the day.

Anything you tick or untick by hand is kept, and the rest is planned around it. A stop counts as an overnight if it has a set departure time or a stop of 5 hours or more.

Speeds and times

Each leg is timed at Speed (% of limit) of the speed limits along it: Valhalla's own road speeds on a sealed-roads route, or limits estimated from OSRM's road speeds otherwise. If a leg looks wrong, type a speed into its Km/h cell. Times are calculated in each stop's own time zone, from Open-Meteo.

Sunrise, sunset and weather

Sunrise and sunset are calculated on your computer (the standard NOAA sunrise equation, accurate to about a minute). Forecasts come from Open-Meteo, up to 16 days ahead, refreshed when older than 3 hours, when stops change, or when you press Refresh weather.

Data sources

All place and road data is from OpenStreetMap and its contributors. These are free, shared services, so the planner spaces out its requests. If one is busy, it waits and retries, and the status line counts down. If both place searches fail, the stops found so far are kept, and pressing Plan trip again a few minutes later carries on from where it stopped.

What is saved on your computer

These are kept in the browser's storage on this computer only, under names starting repatPlanner.:

• Your last plan (form, settings, chosen funeral directors, route, stops, edits, weather and Shell Card stations). It is saved after every change and reopened automatically next time.
• Place search results, including the fuel stations found along routes, kept for 30 days.
• Fuel station opening hours and fuel brands already looked up, kept for 30 days.
• Your funeral director list (opened from a file), kept until you delete entries. Back it up with Export list. On the Cloudflare site, the list is on the server instead; the browser keeps only a copy for when the server can't be reached, and the passphrase once given.

Clear trip removes only your last plan. Use Save plan to keep a trip permanently or move it to another computer.

Troubleshooting

Hosting on Cloudflare Pages (shared funeral director list)

The planner works opened straight from a file, but hosted on Cloudflare Pages it can keep one shared funeral director list for everyone. The files are laid out like this, in a GitHub repository:

Cloudflare's drag-and-drop upload can't deploy the functions folder, so the site is deployed from GitHub (or with Cloudflare's Wrangler tool).

Set it up once

1. Create the storage. In the Cloudflare dashboard, go to Storage & Databases → KV and create a namespace, e.g. repat-funeral-directors.
2. Create the site. Go to Workers & Pages → Create, choose Pages and import your GitHub repository, then set: Framework preset None, Build command blank, Build output directory public. Save and deploy.
3. Connect the storage. In the Pages project: Settings → Bindings → Add → KV namespace. Variable name FD_KV (exactly), and choose the namespace from step 1.
4. Set the passphrase. Settings → Variables and Secrets → Add: name EDIT_KEY (exactly), type Secret, value your passphrase. Use something long that others won't guess; anyone with the passphrase can change the list.
5. Redeploy (Deployments → the latest one → Retry deployment, or push any change). The binding and secret only take effect after a redeploy.
6. Open the site, open Funeral directors list, and check the window says "Shared list, kept on the server". Then add one or import your CSV; the passphrase is asked for at the first change.

Anyone who has the site's address can see the list and plan trips; only people with the passphrase can change it. To keep the whole site private, turn on Cloudflare Access for the Pages project (in the project's settings), so only listed email addresses can open it.

Use the site's main address (yourproject.pages.dev). Preview builds get their own addresses, which share the server list but keep their own saved trips and passphrase.

Cloudflare's free plan covers this comfortably: each change to the list is one write (importing saves every 10 addresses found), within the free allowance of 1,000 writes a day. A change can take up to about a minute to show on a device in another part of the world.

For anyone editing the code

index.html has three parts, all commented in detail:

1. Page layout and styles (HTML and CSS). Colours are named settings at the top of the styles, with light and dark versions.
2. Core: all calculations, with no screen and no internet: the route model, possible stops, stop scoring, fuel planning, time zones, sunrise and sunset, the sheet and day totals, and the Shell Card brand rules (shellCardStatus). It can be tested on its own in Node.js.
3. The page script: the Trip form, online lookups, funeral directors, Shell Card stations, stop picking, map, sheet drawing, editing, export and saving.

The shared funeral director list is served by functions/api/funeral-directors.js (Cloudflare Pages Function, stored in KV under the key funeral-directors); its comments describe the requests. The page looks for it on start-up and falls back to the browser's own list without it.

The Shell Card brand lists are SHELL_CARD_YES and SHELL_CARD_CHECK in Core. The coroner's location is in PRESETS in the page script. The funeral director radius is FD_RADIUS_KM (10 km). A list of funeral directors can be built into the file in BUILTIN_FDS: each is copied into the user's list the first time the page opens.

Adapted from the Bike Trip Planner: the calculations are unchanged apart from the car routing profile, the defaults and the additions above.