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Abstract
The introduction of the railway network brought with it an unprecedented improvement in accessibility. In this work, the authors analyze the evolution of the territorial coverage of the railway network and its influence on the uneven distribution of population. To carry out this research, they used comparable data on total population obtained from census records relating to civil parishes of England and Wales, taken at 10-year intervals from 1871. The hypothesis that they wished to test was that good access to a railway station was related to significant increases in population. This exercise provides a better understanding of regional variations in population growth and allows the authors to identify current differences between urban and rural areas that have resulted from their historical evolution.
Acknowledgments
Partial funding was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Education (CS02010-16389), the EU (Jean Monnet 200215-LLP-2011-ES-AJM-IC), and ICREA-Academia (Generalitat de Catalunya).
Notes
1. Sybil Derrible (Citation2010) defined this concept as the area covered by a transportation network and the population involved, using a predefined radius around each station. In other words, José María Subero (Citation2009, 69) defined coverage as “the degree of attraction exerted by the network, or the utility that it has for those who use it to move from place to place.”
2. There is research work currently underway on this subject, directed by Dr. Leigh Shaw-Taylor, “The Occupational Structure of England and Wales, c.1750–1911,” a paper prepared by the INCHOS workshop held in Cambridge from July 29–31, 2009.
3. Recent studies based on the opinions of railway users have shown that access to the railway is a decisive factor when it comes to choosing how to travel (Brons, Givoni, and Rietveld Citation2009). It therefore seems reasonable to think that when no other modes of transport are available, access to the railway network may prove decisive in the choice of a place of residence. In this way, territories with a good level of railway coverage would have a greater potential for growth.
4. The basic administrative entity, which is roughly equivalent to the municipality, albeit at a smaller scale.
5. The table corresponding to the stations contains 56 fields, implying an overall total of 661,808 elements. The table of railway lines contains 31 fields with a total of 521,079 registers. In total, there are therefore 1,182,877 entries.
6. Permission from the publisher and author to transfer this information to a GIS was obtained when J. Martí-Henneberg was a Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University. We would like to thank Professor Tony Wrigley for his help.
7. Precise definitions and changes over time make it very difficult to provide exact numbers relating to any type of British administrative unit.
8. The GRO clearly struggled in its attempt to include parish-level units in the census and had to include a wide variety of units: parishes, townships, chapelries, and extra-parochial places. However, the complexities of this are beyond the scope of the present article.
9. Given the lack of alternative modes of transport, it was considered appropriate to limit the service areas to the distances that people would be willing to travel for one and two hours, using non-motorized forms of transport, in order to catch a train. In recent studies the area of coverage of a station was considered to be approximately 5 km for medium-distance journeys and 10 km for long distance travel (Wardman and Tyler Citation2000). Other studies have fixed a distance of 3 km as the limit for differentiating journeys associated with access to the railway network (Givoni and Rietveld Citation2007).
10. For each year, we made more than 260 million automatic calculations, following each of the stages explained in the methodology. For the whole project, which involved seven different points in time, we therefore carried out over 1,800,000,000 operations. Without the GIS database, it would logically have been impossible to undertake a project of this type.
11. Other studies, such as the one cited by Carl Koopmans et al. (Citation2012) relating to Dutch territory, did not take this effect into account and instead considered 6 km/h as the average speed for travelling along pathways and canals. This difference in criteria is justified by the evident differences between the geography of England and Wales and that of the Netherlands, which is the flattest country in the world. As the case of England and Wales is not the same, it was necessary to introduce this additional parameter into the calculation.
12. Civil parishes are the smallest scale administrative unit with available data. The urban polygons (or constructed areas) were the topological units into which the civil parishes with discontinuous fields were divided in the GIS model. They therefore constitute a lower rank element than the civil parishes.
13. The London underground, which connected the railway stations in the central area, is not included in this GIS.