Seminar 2 -

1 Seminar 2: Will Deakin

1.1 Make Things as Simple as Possible…but no Simpler

The slides and high-resolution versions of some images from the talk are available here

1.2 The Global Railway

The railway is international, noting the location of the United Kingdom

1.3 The British Railway

The operation of railway infrastructure in Britain is organised into thirteen routes and six regions.

This diagram show four routes that make up the Eastern region.

2 Logical Models

To understand the a complex system like the railway it helps to decompose the system into a set of logical processes.

2.1 Logical Network Model

The timetable production process can be modeled as a series of processes and interactions between railway operators and infrastructure manager.

2.2 Logical Operations Model

The operation production process can be modeled as series of processes and data exchange.

3 Emissions

Why does rail matter

Climate change and environmental degradation are an existential threat to UK, Europe and the world

  • We need rail modal shift to rail freight transport to delivery
  • no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050
  • economic growth decoupled from resource use
  • where no person and no place left behind

(From the European Rail Green Deal 2019)

3.1 Green House Gases (CO2)

UK produced 455 million tonnes CO2 equivalent (mtCO2e) in 2019

Transport accounted for 122 mtCO2e (26.8%) of which

  • HGV 19.5 mtCO2e (16.0%/4.2%)
  • All rail 1.7 mtCO2e (1.4%/0.04%)
  • A freight train removes up to 76 HGVs from our roads

3.2 National Greenhouse Emissions 1990-2020

3.3 Transport Greenhouse Emissions 1990-2020

(from DfT Transport Statistics (2021))

4 Data Visualisation

Rail electrification

Rail network in black, electrified rail in red.

4.1 System Visualisation

An Open-TrainTimes (OTT) schematic view of Leeds Stations

  • OpenTrainTimes: here
  • National Rail Enquiries here
  • Realtime Trains here

4.2 Operation Railway

The view of live operational railway systems.

5 A Very European Railway

A full automated luxury high-speed European rail network

Projecting population data onto labeled, scaled h3 hexagon to create a theoretical high-speed rail network.

6 Insights from Open Data

Using Office of Road and Rail (ORR) Origin and Destination Matrix (ODM) data for rail journeys overlaid onto the railway centre-line track-model.

6.1 The Power of Social Media

The benefit of positive social media interaction.

6.2 The Power of Open Data

All data used is on the basis that it under open or permissive license.

  1. The base map of mainland Britain is derived from the WorldPop base maps under CC 4.0 by deed retrieved 2023-09-07.
  2. The centre-line track-model is hosted by OpenRailData under the Open Government License(OGL) by Network Rail, retrieved 2023-07-11.
  3. The Origin Destination Matrix data, for example ODM 2022-23, were published by the Office of Road and Rail on the Rail Development Group Rail Data Marketplace, under the OGL. Retrieved 2024-02-18.
  4. The Station Attributes for All-Mainline Stations published by the Office of Road and Rail under the OGL. Retrieved 2024-02-18.
  5. The Network Rail CORPUS dataset is an open data feed which is released under the OGL. Retrieved 2023-11-29 as a local copy.
  6. The National Public Transport Access Network (NaPTAN) under the OGL and is updated each time the scripts are run.
  7. While this implementation now uses NaPTAN and CORPUS to validate and identify six closed stations, the Isle of Wight ferry-link continues to use OpenStreetMap data, licensed under CC-BY-SA 2.0 through the OverPassAPI Turbo service, and is updated each time the scripts are run.

6.3 15 Seconds of Fame

The original 2018/19 visualisation recieved 500k X/Twitter views within a week, as well as an OpenInnovations blog post and a Bloomberg article Nine Maps Show How Britain Is on the Move.

All code and data is published on GitHub under my anisotropi4/kingfisher repository and updated with the ORR publication of the additional 2020-2024 financial year data.

6.4 Simple Visualisations

The squares and coolest countries in Europe.

7 Network Simplification

Simplifing the full 2011 Output Area (OA) network to project .

7.1 Shortest path census flow

7.2 Output Area (OA) Census 2011 centroid

7.3 Full OA 2011 Delaunay mesh

7.4 OA 2011 ODM mesh

7.5 Network simplification and parenx

The network merge paper is here.

The parenx PyPi module.

7.5.1 parenx cookbook

The parenx cookbook shows examples of how to use the parenx library.

8 Parting Words

8.1 Make it look good.

Art E-coli statue.

8.2 The Railway

Beeching 1963 and today.

9 References

  1. Wikipedia, International Klein Blue (#002FA7), here
  2. Rail Alphabet, description and download, here
  3. SPSmiler, “London Underground Tube”, here
  4. Homer, Iliad, Perseus Digital Library here, accessed 4 May 2022
  5. Transport Statistics Department for Transport, here
  6. Department for Business, Energy & Industry Strategy, here
  7. Open Rail Data wiki, here
  8. Rail Development Group “Concept of Operations – Stock and Crew System” (RDG-CONOPS/NTI/002 Issue 1.1) January 2021 here
  9. National Electronic Sectional Appendix (NESA) here
  10. NESA table extract here
  11. Department for Transport Energy and environment: data tables (ENV0201) here
  12. WorldPop Project here, data licensed under creative commons 4.0
  13. EC Global Human Settlement layer here, data licensed under creative commons 4.0
  14. OpenStreetMap here, data licensed under Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0
  15. Overpass Turbo here
  16. python language here, licensed under PSF for python 3.11 here
  17. Pandas here, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  18. GeoPandas here, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  19. Department for Transport “Great British Railways: Williams-Shapps plan for rail”, here
  20. UK Electrification map, here
  21. Railway Industry Association “Why Rail Electrification”, 2021, here
  22. European Agency for Railways “Fostering Rail Through Green Deal – part 2 Freight”, 2021, here
  23. RailNet Europe, “Timetabling and Capacity Redesign (TTR)”, 2022, here
  24. Network Rail, “Rail freight forecasts Scenarios for 2033-34 and 2043-44”, 2016, here
  25. Shapely here, licensed under BSD 3-clause license
  26. Rasterio here, under the Rasterio license here
  27. Tobler here, under BSD license
  28. QGIS here, under the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license
  29. OSMnx: Boeing, G. 2017. OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 65, 126-139.
  30. Uber H3 here, licensed under the Apache license 2.0