Sunday, 20 August 2023

GB railway stations + nearest station

I'm sharing a file of the location of all railway stations in Great Britain, put together from Table 1410 of the UK's Office of Rail and Road (ORR). So, clearly, a momentous occasion. I published something similar years ago and I see people still using it but the old one doesn't have new stations like Reston, Inverness Airport or Marsh Barton in it. Oh, and I also calculated the nearest station (as the crow flies) for each station, just out of curiosity. Here's the spreadsheet. 

The real blockbuster of the summer

I posted a few maps I made of this on my twitter, as a kind of annoying map quiz - these are copied below too. What on earth are these maps showing? Well, for each of the 2,573 stations in my dataset I simply drew a line to its nearest station. Sometimes the lines are reciprocal - e.g. for Aberdeen, Dyce is the nearest station as the crow flies, and for Dyce, Aberdeen is nearest. In these cases the lines on the map look a bit glowy because there are two overlapping each other. But this kind of thing isn't always the case. That's why the maps look kind of disjointed and weird.






Now, if you can't be bothered clicking on to the spreadsheet then here are the numbers on furthest gaps between stations and also nearest to each other according to my calculations. And remember that a) this is straight line distance, as the crow flies, and b) it doesn't mean you can actually travel between these station pairs. It's purely a measure of how far away - in a straight line - the nearest station is.

  1. Malton to York - 27.4 km / 17.0 miles
  2. Stranraer to Barrhill - 26.1 km / 16.2 miles
  3. Wick to Georgemas Junction - 22.2 km / 13.8 miles

and at the bottom of the list

  • Catford to Catford Bridge - 0.09 km / 0.06 miles
  • Catford Bridge to Catford - 0.09 km / 0.06 miles
  • St Budeaux Victoria Road to St Budeaux Ferry Road - 0.12 km / 0.08 miles


Hmm, but what about actual distance along the railway? Could we try and figure this out? Yes we could. But first here's a map or two comparing the longest straight lines to how bendy the real lines are.


Bendy

VERY bendy

Surprisingly bendy

And my quest to find the longest gap between stations - again, regardless of whether you can get a train from one to the other - has led me to the following maps.

More interesting if you're into this stuff

I do believe we have a winner

Not very bendy, so similar distances

Okay, so, to sum up.

  • Some stations are far away from others.
  • Some stations are close to others.
  • Some stations are even further away if you are a train.
  • Malton to York is the 'furthest nearest' station gap at 27.4 km / 17.0 miles
  • Stranraer to Barrhill is the 'furthest nearest' station gap if you follow the railway line, at 41.4 km / 25.7 miles.
  • Coatbridge Central and Highbury & Islington are both the nearest station - as the crow flies - to four other stations. That's more than any other.
  • What about tube stations, tram stops, subway, etc? I'm only looking at the national network of rail stations included in the ORR data here so that's not part of this.



The clue is in the name!

Centre of a universe


Another more bendy one




Monday, 14 August 2023

Global terrain maps

A short post today, with some visuals. I used some Blue Marble imagery from NASA - one layer was topography and the other was the colour image of the earth for August - and then I used the prelease v2 of Aerialod to visualise it. I tweaked the Blue Marble colours slightly and the elevation and bathymetry (in the final images) is greatly exaggerated, for effect.

I had a bit of fun with this. And this is the result.

NASA Blue Marble + topography

A few bumps in Europe and North Africa

Some nice colours and interesting bumps here

A view across most of North America

A slightly different angle on South America

I quite like this perspective, very interesting

Gosh, The Himalayas are quite big

So many mountains here!

Another pretty interesting view

Same as the first one, but with a few more light effects


That's all for now :)

With exaggerated bathymetry too

Classic mid-Atlantic wrinkles

Maps without New Zealand should not exist