WERMA – West-Europe Rail Map Archive

Overview

Crowdsourcing / Citizens’ science GIS / HGIS Apps / Interfaces for data visualization Landscape reconstruction Maps Photos Platform for data aggregation or retrieval Tools for data enrichment

WERMA: West-Europe Rail Map Archive, a collaborative portal

2021 was the European Year of the Rail: Future must build onto lessons of the Past. This project involving coding all past/present railway stations, stems from the EU “label” obtained that year.

• Transportation emits more and more CO², but % clean transports (maritime, rail) continues to decline. Rail, the most sustainable mode of land transport, has been weakened for decades. In order to reverse this trend, The European White Paper (2011) recommends a reliable historical analysis. That’s Werma horizon: cross-border historic and forward-looking.
• Rail is born two centuries ago: fair time span for a variety of changes and major events. Western Europe: a fair spatial extent of political and cultural behaviours. Thus Werma objective is: to help empowering related archives, through high quality data, and user-friendly software.
• Countless rail enthusiasts have added thousands contributions to the Internet. This “treasure” is endangered and already disappearing. Helping preservation is the Werma ambition.
• Geocoding the past goes beyond heritage preservation. The making of our Planet”digital twin” is engaged. Werma postulate is : a digital twin must share the past of its real “sister”.

Rail Historical Landmarks

1. The Stockton-Darlington railway: first steam engine on iron rail, 1825
2. Andrézieux – Saint Etienne: first French railway line, 1827
3. Mechelen: initial center of the Belgian rail web, 1835 (étoile de Malines)
4. Tourcoing/Mouscron, Liège/Aachen, Saarbrücken/Metz: crossing borders, 1842-51;
5. Saint-Gottard: first international rail tunnel, 1882;
6. Gare-de-Lyon / Lyon-Part-Dieu: first commercial high-speed rail (TGV) 1981;
7. Folkestone / Calais: the Chunnel, 1994;
8. (planned: night trains yesterday and tomorrow Why sleeper trains are being revived across Europe)

Generic WERMA application (all stations collected so far)

• WERMA full load (can take > 60 sec.), or focus-Belgium, or focus-France

Task plan (ordered by present degree of achievement)

• To collect and geolocate all stations from the West-Europe main rail lines. So far: mainly France, Germany, Luxembourg-Belgium. Seeking additional European partners.
• To collect and geolocate stations on lost lines (disused, dismantled), including tramway / metric lines. So far (june 2024): France:95%, Belgium 85%, Germany-Luxembourg < 10% (expected deadline: end 2024?).
• To code routines for accessing Wikipedia “rail”-pages. So far: Wikipedia-“station”-pages accessed via geosearch-API. Wikipedia-“line”-pages(fr only) are parsed. Adaptations needed for (en,nl,de) versions.
• To index every rail-related open data, mostly VGI^*. So far: a dozen websites identified, four of them partly or totally indexed. Many more expected. (^*:Volunteer Geographic Information.)
• To code routines for VGI data extraction. Some automation is possible, if some “semantic” info is present in a VGI website. So far: about 10000 links to pictures of stations are automatically recorded. Thousands more expected.
• To build the adjacency matrix of the network: intended as an input to weighed route computations. So far: algorithm coded, data structure adapted. Some datasets must be made compliant with the code + interface in progress: DONE june 2024.
• To code route computation (shortest path, etc.). Achievement: expected early 2023.
• To collect the dates (valid-from, valid-to) for lines, and stations. So far: France:80% of lines. Additional routines needed to extract data for stations.
• To code routines for merging socio-demo-eco information (population, distance to station, etc.). Achievement: expected end 2023 (postponed 2024).

(tiny url for this page = https://tinyurl.com/mt2534df)

We are looking for additional partners (eg. contributor to any rail-website in West-Europe). Mailto:contact with subject=”WERMA”.

Project partners

Public datasets