Edinburgh railway development from 1830 to the present day

Abstract

A number of books and articles cover the history of railways in the UK, one of the first countries to establish railways. However, there is a lack of digital maps or railway map data, preventing all manner of spatial searching and analysis. Nowadays, Edinburgh draws many tourists each year due to the preservation of many stunning old structures, for example, National Mining Museum, the National of Scottish Railway Museum and Forth Bridge. Therefore, Edinburgh is a city with a profound and longstanding railway heritage and delving into the rich history of Edinburgh's railways would be a fascinating endeavour. In this project, Oracle was used to store the data while metadata and indexes were added to support the storage and reading of spatial data into GeoJSON. Then, SQL query is written to find out the geographic location and operating period of Edinburgh's railway stations or railway network. Finally, the query results are visualised using Python's Folium library and embedded in the map's web page, allowing users to query and interact with the web page.

During World War I, Edinburgh closed some of its railway stations. In contrast to London, Edinburgh was not seriously affected during World War II and its railway system was well preserved. However, following nationalisation in 1948, some of Edinburgh's railway lines were closed, possibly for a few reasons, including the economic downturn and over-saturation of the market. To conclude, this project allows us to better understand the historical evolution of the Edinburgh Railways, grasp the location information and historical operating period of the railway station, and display this data through map visualisation to provide a more intuitive and convenient query for users.