Overview

The 2 maps of this website show the railway systems of the West of England and of South & West Wales. The latter is still under development; there is still much to do on it but I thought it worth while showing what I've achieved so far. The required map will be shown in a separate window on clicking the 'Download Map' button from the right hand menu.

The main features of the maps are:

• they can be zoomed and panned without loss of detail;
• the date can be set, either by slider control or by specifying a year. Satisfactory use of the slider requires a processor with, I would suggest, a speed of at least 1Ghz, however it does allow users to witness the spread and contraction of the railways dynamically;
• the pre-grouping ownership of the lines is shown;
• track gauge is shown, this may be broad, standard, or mixed; of course this may change as the date is changed;
• goods-only lines are distinguished from passenger lines;
• most significant features are marked, these may be stations, junctions, viaducts, tunnels, and various others;
• clicking on a line or feature generates a separate 'Feature Window' that gives further information extracted from the site's database. This may be information about the line or feature, references to articles and photographs, links to websites, etc. It also allows navigation to the next feature (Up or Down) the line or to the line itself. This capability is currently being developed and is not available for all lines and features. Where it is available there is almost certainly scope for additional data to be shown;
• facilities such as the OS grid reference, county names and boundaries, horizontal and vertical scales, and a tape measure for distances between points, can be toggled on and off.

Heritage lines are not shown; sorry - life's just too short, but maybe one day I will find the time to add them. However, I have included links to their websites from the Feature Window.

SVG Viewer

This functionality is achieved by using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and JavaScript. Although SVG is an official specification drawn up by the WWW Consortium it is not natively supported by Internet Explorer but requires a plug-in (ASV3) freely available from Adobe. Click on the 'Download SVG Viewer' button to access the Adobe Download page. This will present you with a list of the versions of ASV3 available, categorised by language and operating system. If, having downloaded ASV3, you experience problems viewing my map visit one of the sites listed on the 'SVG Resources' page to check that ASV3 has been properly installed on your machine. I would suggest the 'History of Railroads in Twente' site.

There is a possibility that, unknowingly, you already have ASV3 loaded on your computer because apparently it was bundled with some versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader. For more information about SVG click the 'About SVG' link.

The latest versions of some of the more specialised browsers - Konqueror, Opera, and Firefox - do have partial native support for SVG. (You may have to enable this support, it may not be 'ON' by default). Unfortunately Firefox, the most widely used of these three, does not currently support compressed SVG files (as used here) and so cannot be used for this site. There are also incompatibilities between its and ASV3's implementation that I am attempting to resolve. If I achieve this I will provide a non-compressed version of the SVG file for use with Firefox. I have not tested Opera or Konqueror, I would therefore be interested to learn of your experiences with these browsers.

I would welcome your comments, corrections, and contributions. Please email me.

Martin Tester