Railway network of Galicia and Austrian Silesia (1847-1914)

Abstract

We describe and share reconstructed data of the historical railway network of Galicia and Austrian Silesiatwo regions of the Habsburg Empire that covered more than 80 000 km 2 that are currently divided among Czechia, Poland and Ukraine. The network dataset includes the times of railway appearance and of the most dynamic development until 1914, which marked the outbreak of the First World War. Most of the lines were reconstructed based on OpenStreetMap data, and the lines, which were closed down between 1914 and 2019 and are no longer available in spatial datasets, were reconstructed based on high-resolution satellite imagery and historical maps. Altogether, the network dataset covers nearly 5000 km on 127 lines. The data are accompanied by a set of attributes, i.e. the year of construction, length, starting point, finish point, and type (normal, narrow-gauge, etc.), and are available for download in the shp format.

The Spanish railway network, 1848–2023

“…The potential of this type of analysis was soon apparent, and other reconstruction work, digitisation and geo-historical analyses were carried out for the US MidWest (Atack et al, 2008), Britain (Marti-Henneberg et al, 2018) and in Europe (Martí-Henneberg, 2013). It is also relevant to highlight the digitisation of the railway networks of colonial India (Donaldson 2018) or Canada (Cartography Office, 2020), and the inclusion of the stations and improvements in the detail of the digitisation of the 19 th century European network in the cases of France (Thévenin et al, 2013), Italy (Groote, 2020), Galicia and Austrian Silesia (Kaim et al, 2020) and Switzerland (Büchel and Kyburz, 2020).…”

The importance of historical maps for man-made pond research: From the past extent of ponds to issues of the present landscape. A case study from the Czech Republic

“…HGIS traces the long-term spatial development of certain phenomena in the landscape, thus providing valuable information to other sciences dealing with current landscapes. The methods of HGIS are applied in geographic research (among others) in the study of land use development (Demek et al, 2012;Pindozzi et al, 2016), landscape diversity (Yeh and Huang, 2009), changes in natural or anthropogenic landforms (Faccini et al, 2020), and specific landscape features (Kaim et al, 2020;Brykała and Podgórski, 2020). The outcomes of such studies facilitate the understanding of the present landscape development and its functions (Skaloš, Richter and Keken, 2017;Bateman et al, 2020), allow the discovery of locations suitable for conservation (Canessa et al, 2017(Canessa et al, ), or 2021 Moravian geographical reports serve as a basis for modelling future landscape development (Tortora et al, 2015) and a source of inspiration for solving environmental issues in the current landscape (Antrop, 2004;Haase et al, 2007;Marignani et al, 2008).…”