ArcGIS shapefile of the 4923 railway stations 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 stations of England, Wales and Scotland 1807 to 1998, which is structured so that it can generate a GIS of rail stations for any given year between these dates.These data were created as part of a wider 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.
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. He made the initial contact with Cobb, and then with Tony Wrigley, Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Jordi Martí Henneberg of the Departament de Geografia i Sociologia, Universitat de Lleida, sought and obtained permission from Cobb for a GIS digitisation from the revised 2005 reprint of his Atlas.