TimeTable Line graph - right approach

[Adam J M Richards]

Hi there,

I am trying to produce this sort of visualization for timetable data (attached).

It is a format that has been used for about two hundred years to plan timetables in railway systems worldwide, but strangely doesn't appear anywhere online except in some legacy W*s applications. 

The question is what is the right approach to getting Sheets to do this.  There are several features that make it more than a plain line graph. 

1. The data has column 1 as a set of names of places, each of which will become a discrete horizontal line in the graph
2. Each column represents information about the path of a single train.
3. The data has a comment field as row 1 (usually information about the train's source or destination) 
4. Row 2 is train type information, a set of characteristics - this will determine the format of the line used (color or pattern)
5. From Col 2 and Row 3 onward, there are time of day values corresponding to the trains journey (note: two rows are used for the times of arrival at and departure from important stations)

So, just using a line graph doesn't work because although there is a line per train, the type of line and the legend are related to type and not to just one range (row 2).

Note also the y-axis is repeated at the top and the bottom of the graph (actually many larger examples had the x axis repeated on the right as well).

All this leads me to think this needs a new chart type. That's where things get confusing. I see all the ability to create a new chart-type is apparently there - but it is entirely unclear (to me) what is allowed for writing the UI components to be compliant. 

D3 is a powerful SVG wrangler that could certainly be swizzled to produce this result, but I see references to D3 only being allowed in iframe sandboxes like a sidebar (which this isn't trying to be -> it wants to be a chart that could be submitted for use with Sheets proper). 

The GWT Google-web-apis javascript that this site refers to in "Top Tips" under "How to Create a New Chart Type" is apparently status "Inactive" - no longer being maintained as of Sept 11th.  But GWT has Polymer and there is Canvas, and so on, some of which seem to be in beta status or only have been updated a long time ago.   

Given the official advice is now outdated - And before I spend time making a chart that depends on the wrong base >-( - what is the accepted "correct" base for UI components for a new chart type now if there is an ambition to offer the result to the community rather than have a lot of setup by the end user or have to maintain a separate web site? 

Thanks,

Adam

[Adam J M Richards]

Bringing this back - as I find that I first look at this almost 10 years ago and got nowhere.

This style of chart originated by graphing trains by Charles Ibry in the 1840s and has been in use more or less continuously for transport ever since. It is even displayed as the cover art on Edward R. Tufte's “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information,” 1983 - but sadly without the very necessary axes!!! 
See also https://sandrarendgen.wordpress.com/2019/03/15/data-trails-from-paris-with-love/. 

Using a normal line chart actually gets me 90% of the way there with data formatted as rows that start with the time and a sparse table of the data as miles from the origin station at the correct times on each row with the columns being trains/buses/etc. All that is lacking is a way to set the vertical axis tickmarks to be at certain values-> station miles from origin and be labelled as Text -> the station names. Ideally this would be by reading them from a two-column set of tickmark value and label text, or course.

I now see that the Google Charts API apparently has such a feature - to dictate the tickmarks position and their labels, but the charts UI editor seems to lack access to it? Tantalizingly close. I'll see if I can mock this up using the API.