Victorian transport planner - is it feasible

[deltic]

Knowing nothing about IT is it possible to digitilise a copy of Bradshaws and produce an historic transport planner? Being a timetable fan it would be fantastic to be able to plan rail journeys using such a tool and to be able to see how many different ways it was possible to travel between major cities.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I wouldn't have time for such a project, but I see no particular reason why not.

 

[CatfordCat]

From a purely theoretical point of view, there's no reason at all why a journey planner could not be fed a data that's either fictional or historic.

From a practical point of view -

There are not that many sets of journey planning software out there and it's not the kind of thing you can easily get off the shelf.

Every station / stop needs to be created in one data set.

Then train (or bus or whatever) journeys / timetables have to be created electronically linking times to those stops.

You then need to decide whether there should be a default time for connections when changing trains, or whether some stations / situations require a shorter or longer connection time.

And whether the system should offer journeys that take longer but may involve fewer changes, or simply find the fastest possible journeys from A to B. (I guess if we're talking the Victorian network, then considerations like journeys involving step-free interchange might not be an issue)

If the system is going to do more than consider options from station to station (you're suggesting being able to plan journeys from one city to another by any operator) then there will need to be another data set linking stations together by city (or whatever)

And if the planner is to include 'out of station interchanges' e.g. 'take corporation tram from Derby Midland to Derby Friargate' then it will need a way of calculating this - either each possible interchange will have to be set up in a data set, or the whole thing linked to mapping of some sort for walking links to be based on a default walking speed between stations.

More than an afternoon's work!

 

[Philip C]

Similar thoughts have crossed my mind. One of the difficulties would be that it is impossible, in some/many cases, to establish the existence of through carriage working without recourse to other, very hard to come by, documents.

I would welcome a Victorian Bradshaws produced to late BR standards - through carriages in bold, table numbers, some consistency in use of SX, SO, even 24 hour clock (though I can live with 12 hour clock times).

Without the need to publish before the service was implemented time pressure would be reduced. Perhaps a member of this Forum who expects to be 'sent down' for a long time could take the task on?

 

[AngusH]

It would be a most interesting project. Perhaps a historical society might offer a grant?


In terms of practicalities:

Possibly something could be done by converting the dataset to the GTFS format (i.e. Google transit) and then using open trip planner?

I think open trip planner may require open street map data, though?

Open trip planner has the advantage of being free and open source



Or convert the format to the standard ATOC format and look for something that supports that?



The first step is probably to identify a really small subset of the timetable data that can be experimented with.

Also perhaps look for existing databases of stations and then work out from there, adding in the ones that have been closed or moved.

 

[Doctor Fegg]

It's very doable. I know someone who was interested in working on it (and even gave a couple of conference talks to get people interested) but sadly nothing ever came of the project.

The first task would be to get a copy of Bradshaws digitised in a machine-readable format - ideally plain-text CSV or similar, though you'd obviously need some degree of tweaking for through carriages and the like.

In practice I suspect this might be easier done by manual transcription rather than by OCRing, and crowdsourced across a number of volunteers. But you'd need to get the scans online first for people to work from.

Once you've got even just a few timetables ready in a machine-readable format, you could let the world's railway hackers loose on it and see what they come up with. I'm absolutely sure there would be no shortage of people willing to have a go...

 

[AndrewB]

A Victorian live departure board might be a step in right direction.

 

[deltic]

It's very doable. I know someone who was interested in working on it (and even gave a couple of conference talks to get people interested) but sadly nothing ever came of the project.

The first task would be to get a copy of Bradshaws digitised in a machine-readable format - ideally plain-text CSV or similar, though you'd obviously need some degree of tweaking for through carriages and the like.

In practice I suspect this might be easier done by manual transcription rather than by OCRing, and crowdsourced across a number of volunteers. But you'd need to get the scans online first for people to work from.

Once you've got even just a few timetables ready in a machine-readable format, you could let the world's railway hackers loose on it and see what they come up with. I'm absolutely sure there would be no shortage of people willing to have a go...

showing my ignorance here but can an e-book version of Bradshaw be used as a digitised base or are they protected. The European Bradshaw is available as an ebook but sadly not a British version.

 

[thewiltog]

showing my ignorance here but can an e-book version of Bradshaw be used as a digitised base or are they protected. The European Bradshaw is available as an ebook but sadly not a British version.

The Disused Stations web site has a lot of images from Bradshaws (eg here), and there's no copyright or attribution information.

My 1910 David and Charles reprint claims copyright only for the introduction, not for the content.
However, the 1922 one has the usual statement forbidding unauthorised reproduction, storage or transmission by electronic means. How enforceable this would be I don't know.

 

[MedwayValiant]

This was long a bit of a grey area. It had traditionally been held that no new copyright is created by a facsimile reprint, since it is not a "work requiring skill".

Publishers of facsimile editions had argued that it was a "work requiring skill", since they didn't just blindly scan the pages from the original. Rather, they might also lighten the image if it's too dark to read easily, and might do some minor retouching. But the European Court ruled that this doesn't count as "intellectual creation", which led the Intellectual Property Office to state that "it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as 'original'".

The word "unlikely" does leave a bit of wiggle room for a publisher to try and argue otherwise - but the sort of publisher who does these reprints probably hasn't got the money to pursue the matter very hard, and most solicitors would advise him not even to try since he probably wouldn't win in court.

So for practical purposes, we may take it that while new content (a preface, for instance) absolutely is subject to copyright, the copyright in the facsimile content expired when the original copyright did. Accordingly, any Bradshaws published on or before 31 Dec 1945 is now out of copyright.