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![Figure 2. Atlas of the railways of Great Britain [17].](publication/258661824/figure/fig2/AS:668989583810572@1536510954734/Atlas-of-the-railways-of-Great-Britain-17_Q320.jpg)
The GIS is a tool that allows us to study the logic of the distribution of phenomena that occur on the Earth’s surface. In this article, we propose exploring its potential for historical research over long periods. Here, we present a Historical GIS (HGIS) of the railways of Europe for the period 1830-2010. This is a response to the need to carry ou...
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... of the descriptive and analytical results that we have obtained are presented in this section. First, there is a cartographic representation of the railway lines that opened, closed and were in service during the periods: 1850-1890, 1890-1930, 1930-1970 and 1970-2010 (Fig- ures 3 and 4). These periods were chosen because they are homogeneous, all covering 40-year intervals. ...
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With the objective of the security and sustainability of underground space, the geo-environment suitability assessment for shallow foundation pit was conducted by GIS and AHP methods combining with the characteristics of the study area on the basis of the investigation of the current exploitation of underground space and the geological environment...
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... Closer to our objective is [15]: the spatial extent of Europe to compare countries, the time scale of railways over two centuries, the link of stations to administrative entities, to allow social analysis. The use of ortho-rectified maps in the data collection is sufficient to fit his goal, but not our goal. ...
All twins share the same past. But a digital twin does not. Though the Digital Twin Consortium states that Digital Twins (abbr. DT) use “historical data to represent the past and present and simulate predicted futures”, historical heritage data are rarely addressed. It requires access to anything that is preserved digitally: a share comes from institutions today dedicated to this preservation, supplemented, fortunately, by millions of individual contributions, the “volunteer geographic information” (abbr. VGI). We focus on railways. Rail enthusiasts have contributed quantities of original information on features of which few or nothing remains today. Relating features thru time can rely only on geographical locations, and these locations have a past, what requires a time translation. This article proposes a GIS, augmented with tools for accessing and interpreting VGI, giving this GIS the attributes of a digital twin. Rail enthusiasts' VGI is at risk: often published on loosely maintained websites by an aging community of volunteers, the current number of missing links is a testament to what is already lost,, at a rate that is accelerating as the contributors age. We aim to add tracking capabilities of endangered VGI to DT, and raise awareness about preserving this VGI in sustainable web archives. The main modules of the DT are continuous enhancing of collected data, quality monitoring, Internet retrieval of heritage-oriented VGI, computer simulations, diachronic comparisons and analyses, and archiving assistance. The architecture is a flexible collection of independent modules, combined as a pyramid whose base is a simple GIS, and communicating thru messages. This architecture allows to add modules easily depending on the intended use of the Digital Twin, including interaction with AI agents.
... We would like to stress that there have been previous attempts to reconstruct the Spanish railway network using GIS(Morillas-Torné, 2012;Martí-Henneberg, 2023). However, those studies only included maps of the railway network generated at 10 or 20-year intervals. ...
GIS data on the evolution of railway networks facilitate the study of the role played by the expansion of transport infrastructure since the industrial revolution. The arrival of the railway transformed economic and social activity and the distribution of population within the territory. Given their importance, we have reconstructed and digitised the layout of the railway lines and the location of the stations and halts that existed from the opening of Spain's first railway line, in 1848, until 2023. We have also added indicators of the quality of the network, more specifically, the dates of its electrification and when the track was doubled to allow two-way traffic. The potential of this database lies in its capacity to analyse the interrelationship between the railway infrastructure and a wide range of elements located in the territory, amongst which it is necessary to highlight other modes of transport, urban expansion and socio-economic development.
... Furthermore, GIS has been widely used for analyzing the spatial disparities in accessing rail transport systems (Hinners et al. 2022;Liu et al. 2020;MartÍn et al. 2004;Morillas-Torné 2012). Studies have revealed geographic barriers in accessing rail services, particularly for individuals residing far from railway stations (Cascetta et al. 2020;Luo and Zhao 2021). ...
Ensuring that people from all regions in a country can easily access railway stations is a crucial objective in the development of transportation and mobility systems and is essential for the convenient travel within the country. Furthermore, accurately assessing accessibility in disadvantaged areas is pivotal in designing and implementing development policies for equitable and sustainable transportation systems. Although various methods and tools are available for measuring accessibility, interpreting local-level data remains challenging. This study was conducted in Thailand, a country with severe accessibility disparities but undergoing considerable development. Therefore, the objective of this study was to evaluate accessibility disparities to analyze accessibility capabilities and inequality of railway stations. The objective of the study was to aid the development of inequality and railway services to cover all areas. The geographic information system methodology with network analysis tools was used to visualize and analyze spatial accessibility data and identify regional disparities. The results of this study indicate inequality in accessing railway services, which revealed that densely populated areas have superior access to railway stations compared with districts with a lower population density. Additionally, over 41% of the study area’s population resides more than half an hour away from access to a railway station. This study highlights regional inequality in accessing railway station services. Furthermore, strategies to alleviate this inequality are presented, and the findings will aid government agencies and railway planners in designing critical strategies or formulating policies for improving accessibility to rail transportation systems and reducing inequality in accessing railway services.
... It can be found that most of the previous studies took the construction of the railway network or the opening of high-speed railway as an indicator or influencing factor, and then analyzed other social problems, while there were few studies on the railway network itself. For high-speed rail in the railway network's research of the corresponding research, and less research on integrated rail transit network, the main research methods have included accessibility evolution research methods [17,18], connectivity evolution [19,20], spatial analysis [21][22][23], spatial econometric analysis [24][25][26], network structure evolution [27][28][29][30][31][32][33], the space syntax [34], the network robustness [35,36], deep learning [37,38], multi-layer network research method [39], etc. Data sources such as railway route maps, railway network timetables, trade flows, and rail transit flows between different stations or cities are studied in depth [40]. ...
How to improve the partial or overall performance of rail transit route network, strengthen the connection between different rail network stations, and form corresponding communities to resist the impact of sudden or long-term external factors has earned a lot of attention recently. However, the corresponding research studies are mostly based on the rail network structure, and the analysis and exploration of the community formed by the stations and its robustness are not enough. In this article, the evolution of the China rail transit route network (CRTRN) from 2009 to 2022 is taken as the research object, and its complex network characteristics, BGLL model-based community division, and multi disturbance strategies for network robustness are analyzed in depth to better understand and optimize the rail network structure to further effectively improve the efficiency of the public transport system. It is found that CRTRN is gradually expanding following the southwest direction (with the migration distance of nearly 200 km), the distribution of routes is more balanced, and the number of network communities is steadily decreasing (it dropped from 30 communities in 2009 to 25 in 2019), making various regions become closely connected. However, it can also be found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the CRTRN is strongly affected, and the network structure becomes relatively loose and chaotic (the number of communities became 30). To protect the railway networks, the CRTRN system should pay more attention to stations with high node degree values; if they get disturbed, more areas will be affected. The corresponding research conclusions can provide some theoretical and practical support for the construction of the rail transit network in China.
... Shape files needed for mapping the spatial distribution of historical railways are not publicly available. To overcome the obstacle, this paper exploits data from Morillas-Torné (2012), and proceed as follows. Digital maps are rendered as vector files on a GIS. ...
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... Historical studies dealing with rail during the Great War are therefore rare, and are generally restricted to emblematic subjects (for example 1914 mobilization (Lepage, 1996), the Second Battle of the Aisne (Geagea, 2012)), technical, for example the use of the metric track (Puig, 1996), political and/or socio-economic aspects (Caron, 2005;Desplantes, 1995;Ellenberger, 1975;Prévot, 2014;Roden, 2014), or even railwaymen (Lebrun, 2004), without involving the environmental and spatial dimensions. Historical geography studies on railway networks in the Great War focus on questions of economic flows at regional, national or cross-border scales (Prévot, 2017), some of them incorporate Geographic Information Systems (GIS) (Martí-Henneberg, 2017;Morillas-Torné, 2012). ...
This contribution proposes to analyze a single archaeological object crossed by different conservation processes, to isolate and understand the role of geomorphological parameters in the formation and the conservation of anthropogenic geomorphic features. For these purposes, this study characterizes the remnant morphologies of the WW1 railroad in the Montagne de Reims on the western front (France, Rheims sector) through LiDAR-derived digital terrain models combined with archival documents (maps and historical photographs), spatial analysis and field surveys. This study shows that the Heavy Railway Artillery (Artillerie Lourde sur Voie Ferrée - ALVF) is a significant morphogenic feature, preserved at more than 70%. However, this morphology is subject to a strong variability. Ruggedness analysis shows a much more pronounced morphology on the slopes than on the plateaus, demonstrating a difference in formation and preservation processes. For formation processes, the study's findings reveal that geotechnical constraints related to lithology and geomorphology can be overridden for military purposes. For conservation processes, they are largely dependent on land use practices. This research demonstrates that (i) the role of landscape and topographical parameters in the interpretability of features is predominant; (ii) military engineering has been able to adapt to a much diversified topography.
... Then, on a continental scale, the evolution pattern of railway network in Europe was analyzed to reveal the large-scale demographic changes [30] and explain the relationship between urbanization and railway [31,32]. A geospatial database of historical railways was also created for mapping the overall railway system and its changes in Europe [33]. Studies on the development of French railway system using the GIS approach have been conducted. ...
Scenic railway refers to the trains that operate for tourism purposes, which are mainly maintained for facilitating leisure activities, scenic tours, and heritage experiences. As both an extension of railway heritage and an important redevelopment method, this concept is meaningful for the touristic development of historical railways but has received less attention in academia. To understand the tourism and landscape values of scenic railways from a geo-historical perspective and discuss the recent techniques and methods for railway tourism, this article first introduces the relationship between railway and landscape and the concept of scenic railway in French literature. Secondly, it analyzes the current distribution of French scenic railways based on geographic information system (GIS) tools. Through georeferencing, mapping, data relating and joining, calculating, and classifying, different groups of scenic railways are systemized and published online. Following statistical treatment, the pattern of distribution of scenic railways in comparison with the standard-gauge railway system in France is revealed. Based on the discussions on scenic railways, further study should focus more on the landscape evaluation of scenic railways and its integration with other spatial technologies for deeper geo-analysis. Moreover, the research results can serve as a reference for the development of relative railway heritage and tourist activities.
... Linking railway data with socio-eco-demographic data in historical geographic information systems (GIS), would contribute to understanding long-term trends. This approach has been developed by Siebert [5], and, in Europe by Gregory et al. [6], and Morillas-Torné [7] with a very similar goal, and uses several European public datasets, which record main rail lines (no secondary rail lines). For that purpose, we need the minimal information to linking gares with communes, and to linking gares with lignes. ...
... Every ligne has two ends: an origin node, and a terminus node. One ligne either is "active", or has a "validTo" (alias "end") date; (7). Every gare has one or more node(s), but a node may have no gare (e.g., a fork); ...
... Constraint (6): a failure must trigger a search for additional information (Section 3). Constraint (7): several nodes attached to the same gare, may differ in geometry, what is a major cause of indecision in the fusion process. ...
Providing long-term data about the evolution of railway networks in Europe may help us understand how European Union (EU) member states behave in the long-term, and how they can comply with present EU recommendations. This paper proposes a methodology for collecting data about railway stations, at the maximal extent of the French railway network, a century ago.The expected outcome is a geocoded dataset of French railway stations (gares), which: (a) links gares to each other, (b) links gares with French communes, the basic administrative level for statistical information. Present stations are well documented in public data, but thousands of past stations are sparsely recorded, not geocoded, and often ignored, except in volunteer geographic information (VGI), either collaboratively through Wikipedia or individually. VGI is very valuable in keeping track of that heritage, and remote sensing, including aerial photography is often the last chance to obtain precise locations. The approach is a series of steps: (1) meta-analysis of the public datasets, (2) three-steps fusion: measure-decision-combination, between public datasets, (3) computer-assisted geocoding for ‘gares’ where fusion fails, (4) integration of additional gares gathered from VGI, (5) automated quality control, indicating where quality is questionable. These five families of methods, form a comprehensive computer-assisted reconstruction process (CARP), which constitutes the core of this paper. The outcome is a reliable dataset—in geojson format under open license—encompassing (by January 2021) more than 10,700 items linked to about 7500 of the 35,500 communes of France: that is 60% more than recorded before. This work demonstrates: (a) it is possible to reconstruct transport data from the past, at a national scale; (b) the value of remote sensing and of VGI is considerable in completing public sources from an historical perspective; (c) data quality can be monitored all along the process and (d) the geocoded outcome is ready for a large variety of further studies with statistical data (demography, density, space coverage, CO2 simulation, environmental policies, etc.).
... Cultural Resource Management based on a geodatabase and the spatial analysis for landscape features, spatial processing, and viewsheds are some main applications of GIS (Zhang, 2010). The historical GIS (HGIS) approach was also applied to build the database of historical railways in Europe, for the analysis of their pattern evolution (Morillas-Torné , 2012), explaining the relationship between urbanization and railway (Atack et al., 2010). For example, the heritage system of the Chinese Eastern Railway uses GIS combined with GPS and remote sensing and matrix laboratory (MATLAB) as the platform, combined the Minimum Cumulative Resistance Model and the analytic hierarchy process to build a spatial pattern of heritage corridors of different levels (Tang, 2017). ...
Railways were a key mode of transporting goods and people for industrial and urban development in the late modern age. Their special part in economic growth comes with their role in the development of cultural heritage along their pathways. However, because of competing urban construction, many railway heritages are in danger, such as the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway (YVR) in China, an important international narrow-gauge railway built in 1901, acknowledged as a railway heritage in 2018. As a typical linear heritage, the railway integrates both the natural and cultural landscapes, related to the large spatial extent and complex composition of single heritage elements. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offer a great support in the investigation, assessment, and management of railway heritage. In this research, the huge cultural heritage related to the YVR was studied using a combined geo-historical and GIS approach. This paper aims to 1) give a brief review of the current status of the application of GIS on linear railway heritages studies, including heritage resources surveys, spatial analysis, thematic mapping and public service, 2) introduce the case study of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, and 3) present a geodatabase design for the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway heritage management.
... In the digital age, storytelling with maps was mainly based on historical events or objects presentation on digital maps [4], as well as the development of historical GIS [5][6][7]. At the same time, the limitations of traditional solutions in this area resulted in the development of spatio-temporal databases, which are a source of data used for storytelling. ...
As a result of changes in boundaries, the political affiliation of locations also changes. Data on such locations are now collected in datasets with reference to the present or to the past space. Therefore, they can refer to localities that either no longer exist, have a different name now, or lay outside of the current borders of the country. Moreover, thematic data describing the past are related to events, customs, items that are always “somewhere”. Storytelling about the past is incomplete without knowledge about the places in which the given story has happened. Therefore, the objective of the article is to discuss the concept of spatio-temporal database for border areas as an “engine” for visualization of thematic data in time-oriented geographical space. The paper focuses on studying the place names on the Polish-Ukrainian border, analyzing the changes that have occurred in this area over the past 80 years (where there were three different countries during this period), and defining the changeability rules. As a result of the research, the architecture of spatio-temporal databases is defined, as well as the rules for using them for data geovisualisation in historical context.
