Introducing GeoFurlong

[Alan Morrison]

Hello All,

I’m pleased to announce that the source code and data library which form the foundations for geofurlong.com have been released under permissive licences.

These have been made possible by the release of the Network Rail (NR) geospatial datasets (thanks to requests by Peter Hicks) and the availability of Ordnance Survey (OS) geospatial datasets.

The data library contains pre-computed geographic positions for each Network Rail route (by Engineer’s Line Reference – ELR) at multiple intervals, ranging from 22 yards to five miles. These files allow easy lookup of geographic position (as OS Easting / Northing, Longitude / Latitude, and OS Grid Reference). The data library is stored on Dropbox.

Corresponding data files provide additional non-railway location details along each ELR at the same intervals using OS and NR data. These files allow easy lookup of the geographic position plus the NR Region, Country, Administrative Area, and nearest Populated Place (with its corresponding distance to the railway).

The GitHub repository contains the source code for the data builder. It includes an API (written in Go) which provides the geographic position of a mileage or mileage range for a given ELR. APIs for other programming languages and client examples, including reverse geocoding, will be published in the near future on GitHub.

I’ve added these to the Open Rail Data Projects wiki page.

Hopefully these will be of interest to some of the members.


Alan

[David Rickmann]

That's really great. Thanks Alan!

I've often built mini versions of this for specific projects. Having a full dataset of it will be incredibly useful!