Train schedules

Introduction

Timetable of train

verso with more timetable

map of the railway network

This project aims to observe how a railway user of the middle of the 19th century could travel between some cities such as Paris, Lyon, Geneva or Marseille in regards to nowadays. Several aspects of the trip have been looked into, the journey path, the schedules of the trains and the price of the tickets. All of these informations come from a single document that contains both a timetable and a map of the railway network and have been computed into a program, so one can look for a trip and find easily all the informations needed. This whole project puts into perspective how the evolution of transports, in this particular example trains, have made the world much more connected and travelling much easier.

The document

This project will focus on this old train schedules from 1858.

• History of the document, context, ...

Project Plan and Milestones

The first obvious thing that had to be done with such a document was understanding how it works, i.e. what informations it contains and how they are organized. The document was printed in an A3-format to facilitate its study and the manual data extraction. Then the main focus switched to the coding part of the project. Some basic knowledge in java (html, javascript, js, css, ...) were essential for this project and one had thus to get first familiar with this language. Then, some Java library were identified as potentially helpful and the data were chosen to be entered the computer as JSON objects. As this is a tedious job, It was decided to make a first test of the program with only one possible route, and then, only if it turned out to work well, to enter more data to extend the program. The aesthetic aspect of the interface was only dealt at te very end of the project, when the program was fully working. All these tasks were evenly splitted in order for each member of the group to spend the same amount of time on the project. Weekly meeting, in addition to the usual lecture hours were set up to insure that the project was going forward and respected the milestones set at the beginning of the project. The following list summarizes how the project was planned:

Already done

• 12.10.2018: Formation of group, choice of map.
• 17.10.2018: Decision about what to do with this map. Resulted in a CFF-like website.
• 19.10.2018: Presentation of the idea to the class.
• 24.10.2018: Understanding of the document, A3-model printed.
• 31.10.2018: Getting familiar with java languages. Basic html program. Choice of system to store the data (JSON file)
• 07.11.2018: Preparation of the slides for the midterm evaluation. Choice of java libraries for the program.
• 09.11.2018: Preparation of the slides for the midterm evaluation. Choice of java libraries for the program.

The map

• comparaison with actual railway networks
• ...

The app

• how it works
• example of comparaison

Further possible development

• assess impact of train in cities development
• create a game with trains