Length of Railway Lines
The aim of this series is to visualize the development of the railways of Europe between 1825 and 2000, using the length of the lines opened as the key indicator of the economic potential of this most important transport infrastructure. The data presented in these maps has been taken from a variety of transnational sources now contained in the TIE-Database maintained at Eindhoven University of Technology. In the maps, the length of railway lines (given in km) is represented in form of a horizontal bar graph, in which the color of the individual column represents a specific benchmark year. The scale varies throughout the series, so the reader has to check in the legend for the scale of the individual map, and be cautious in comparing two or more maps by mere viewing. The first four maps focus on the development of the length of the European railway lines in period from 1825 until 1913, using five years intervals between the maps. One map is then devoted to the interwar years. The last three maps concentrate on the developments after the Second World War and are divided into ten-year intervals.
