Friday, June 5, 2015

How far can you go from any European capital to anywhere else by train?

Stephan Franziskus runs an interesting blog where he has written a great post about the history Isochrone Maps. These maps use color gradients and contour lines to visualize the places one can reach from a single destination within different time windows (isochrones).

obs. We have already posted about these maps in this blog to show some isochronic maps of American railways in the 1800s, a similar map departing from Rome during the times of the Roman Empire, and a contrast between Old and New techniques of isochrone maps.

Stephan Franziskus shows a very precious map, created by Francis Galton (yeap, the same Galton who demonstrated the central limit theorem using a 'bean machine'), which shows the number of days to get to different places in the world if you were to departure from London in 1881.


More recently, Peter Kerpedjiev has applied the same idea to estimate the places one can reach from different European capitals within different time windows using only trains and walking. There is a very good piece by Lazaro Gamio published in The Washington Post covering Kerpedjiev's work. You might like it.

click on the image to enlarge it
[image credit: Peter Kerpedjiev, Lazaro Gamio, WP]