Railroads in Denmark since 1847

For a new project I digitized historical railroad lines in Denmark. The video below shows the development of the network over the past 150 years. I think it is quite amazing to see how dense the network was around 1930, reaching more than 5,000 km of railway lines. With the closure of many lines especially during the 1950s and 1960s this has dropped to around half – a development which could be seen in many other countries too. Very few new lines got build in the recent decades focusing however only on metropolitan areas and the replacement of old (twisting) lines with new high speed corridors.

Sorry that the time is not shown in the display. I did the animation with ArcGIS 10 and could not find out how to do that (though I could in ArcGIS 9.3…). However, if you open the video in YouTube and activate subtitles you can see the time in decades.

I collected and digitized the data based on Aage Aagesen (1949) and historical topographical maps and orthophotos. Further information on dates of opening and closure were retrieved from Wikipedia, www.danskejernbaner.dk and jernbanestationer.dk.

~ by landblend on 01/03/2012.