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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2023

Mapping Half a Century of Accessibility via the French Railway Network, 1860–1910

Résumé

In 1930, the French railway network consisted of more than 50,000 km of lines. Less than a century later, the network has been halved to 28,000 km. This phenomenon of the extension and then retraction of railway lines has not only shaped the landscape, but it has undoubtedly had an even greater impact on the political, economic and demographic organisation of the French metropolitan area. Beyond these structural effects, our relationship with time has been profoundly modified. Based on this observation, the chapter proposes to revisit these major transformations in the light of the concept of accessibility over a long period of time, from the construction of the railway network to its apogee in 1930. To this end, we will first present in detail the French database, which will be the support of our method. Integrated into a historical GIS, this numerical corpus lists the openings, closing and modernisations of railway lines of national, regional and local interest in France. Two dynamics of networks will be combined in this case: the topology of the network and the revolution of speed, which produced many disparities from one line to another. A demographic database completes this first source to reveal the spatial dynamics. We will also see how to transform this geographical network into a graph capable of assessing travel times over a century and combining railroads and pedestrian networks, very useful in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the results will be presented in the form of unipolar and multipolar accessibility maps, in order to relate effects on demographic changes. This case uses free software, from the acquisition of spatial data towards H-GIS and graph calculations. Mentioned also are the didactics, how users will be able to work on this subject, using the data provided or other data for other periods or countries. During this chapter, all the database and software will be available in open access. The French dataset will be available in free access as a multigraph composed on lines (arcs) and stations (nodes). The municipal population will be made accessible for each decade, during the entire study period (1830–1930) in the form of a shapefile. A free GIS (QGIS) will be used to visualise and map the data. The accessibility calculation will be provided with the help of the free software (Modaccess) developed in the TheMA laboratory. Then, users will be trained to use QGIS to formulate indices in the form of SQL queries. Finally, accessibility maps will also be produced using QGIS.
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Dates et versions

hal-04234735 , version 1 (10-10-2023)

Identifiants

Citer

Thomas Thévenin, Christophe Mimeur. Mapping Half a Century of Accessibility via the French Railway Network, 1860–1910. Creative Ways to apply Historical GIS, Springer International Publishing, pp.149-162, 2023, 978-3-031-21731-9. ⟨10.1007/978-3-031-21731-9_11⟩. ⟨hal-04234735⟩
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