Numerisation D'un Siecle de Paysage Ferroviaire Fran\c{c}ais : recul du rail, cons\'equences territoriales et co\^ut environnemental

TL;DR

This paper reconstructs a century of French railway geography using diverse data sources to analyze historical evolution, territorial impacts, and environmental costs of the railway network over time.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, time-aware geographical dataset of French railways, integrating multiple data sources for historical and environmental analysis.

Findings

Reconstructed 90% of the railway network over a century.

Enabled demographic analysis of railway-served cities since 1925.

Facilitated environmental impact simulations like CO2 costs.

Abstract

The reconstruction of geographical data over a century, allows to figuring out the evolution of the French railway landscape, and how it has been impacted by major events (eg.: WWII), or longer time span processes : industry outsourcing, metropolization, public transport policies or absence of them. This work is resulting from the fusion of several public geographical data (SNCF, IGN), enriched with the computer-assisted addition of multiple data gathered on the Internet (Wikipedia, volunteer geographic information). The dataset compounds almost every rail stations (even simple stops) and railway branch nodes, whose link to their respective rail lines allows to build the underlying consistent graph of the network. Every rail line has a "valid to" date (or approx) so that time evolution can be displayed. The present progress of that reconstruction sums up to roughly 90% of what is expected (exact total unknown). This allows to consider temporal demographic analysis (how many cities and towns served by the railway since 1925 up on today), and environmental simulations as well (CO2 cost by given destination ).