London Tube Map

Map Type: GMapCreator tile layer

Data location: Unknown

Uploaded by: richard

Created: 19/02/2008 16:13:23. Viewed 80917 times. Last Viewed: 19/09/2014 11:14:25

Keywords: london tube underground tfl transport

Brief Description


Detailed Information

The map was constructed by downloading the geographical locations of all the London Underground stations from wikimedia. This data comes from the general public and is obtained using GPS receivers at the respective stations. Some stations have multiple locations, which occurs when two lines at the same station are separated by a significant distance e.g. the Jubliee and Northern lines at Waterloo.

After obtaining the locations and storing them in a file using the station name as an index, the stations were connected together to form a network of polylines. This was done separately for each tube line. Although this data describing the network is available for download on wikimedia, it was simpler to build it again in a format that was easer to process.

Once a network file for each tube line had been constructed, then a shapefile containing this information could be built. A small program was written in Java that built a shapefile from the network information for each line, using the geographic location file to place the stations correctly. This program used Geotools to build the shapefile programmatically, using a MultiPolyline shapefile structure to insert each line as a single feature, containing a numeric code identifying the tube line e.g. 1=Victoria, 2=Northern etc.

Now, with a shapefile containing polylines making up the tube network, it is a simple matter to use the Google Map Creator to make the tiles. The colour scale was arranged so that the lines are the usual colours you see on the London Underground maps.