RShapes

Geographic data on the expanding European railway network come from train.eryx.net, a website built by French train enthusiasts Bernard and Raymond Cima. They provide construction dates and map representations of all known railway segments covering almost all of geographic Europe, with the notable exception of England and Wales, which leads us to exclude the British Isles and Ireland from the analysis. We georeference their yearly online map tiles and digitize all line features to construct a geospatial dataset of European rails from the first railway built in 1834 to 1922.

The current version of RShapes can easily be digested through the NASTAC data portal.

You may also download the latest version (1.0) of the raw RShapes data directly in CSV (UTF-8 encoded), GeoJSON, Shapefile, SQL, and R package formats:

GeoJSON
RShapes

Citation

When using this dataset in your research, please cite the following publication:

Cederman, Lars-Erik, Luc Girardin, Carl Müller-Crepon, and Yannick Pengl. 2025. Nationalism and the Transformation of the State: Border Change and Political Violence in the Modern World. Cambridge University Press.

License

Creative Commons License
RShapes by Müller-Crepon, Girardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

This research has benefited from generous financial support from an Advanced ERC Grant 787478 NASTAC.