Train schedules
Introduction
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 web languages (HTML, Javascript, JSON, CSS, ...) were essential for this project and one had thus to get first familiar with this language. Then, some Javascript library were identified as potentially helpful and the data were chosen to be entered in 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 feasibility of converting the data into GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) format is currently being evaluated, as it seems that setting up a server to host node.js is the only way to use GTFS data, and it is not sure that we have the appropriate skills to do so. The aesthetic aspect of the interface and the completion of the wiki article were dealt at the 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 web 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: Mid-term presentation.
Plan for coming weeks:
- 28.11.2018: Working program with one route only (Paris - Bourg).
- 28.11.2018: Half of the data (recto of the page).
- 12.12.2018: Full set of data.
- 12.12.2018: Aesthetic aspect (CSS file).
- 14.12.2018: Wiki article.
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