ArcGIS shapefile of the 15,722 miles of railway lines open for public carriage of passengers and/or freight for England, Wales and Scotland in 1881. These data derive from a time dynamic GIS of the railway lines of England and Wales 1807 to 1998 which is structured so that it can generate a GIS of rail lines for any given year between these dates.These data were created as part of a larger research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.
This project included GIS snapshots of the rail lines and stations of England, Wales and Scotland at three dates: 1851, 1861 and 1881. Max Satchell identified the potential of the Cobb atlas for the creation of both the ESRC snapshots and a much more ambitious time dynamic historical rail GIS dataset.