About the Project

If you want to describe a (railway) network you probably would pick a map. In the case of railways there is a wide range of maps in use, such as ordinary road maps that show railway lines as well, maps shipped with time-tables or maps used internally by the railway companies. This atlas is trying to be something between the first and the latter. It will at some time show all lines in the area of present-day Germany. Additionally all stations, stops, junctions and the like will be shown. The symbols used are inspired by those of the maps of the pre-war Reichsbahn but have been changed to be able to show historic developments.

Tools

Drawing railway maps is a task that demands things are not offered by most drawing tools, e.g., multiple parallel lines, proper placing of symbols at lines, or drawing a lot of little strokes along the lines to indicate electric service. And, of course, everything should look somewhat beautiful.

You don't need to buy expensive software for this. The only thing you have to forget about is a fancy graphical interface (nobody needs that, anyway). The maps have been rendered with MetaPost. This is a language that allows to describe PostScript graphics using math. MetaPost knows quite a lot of math so you express your image by equations and the like. Even the most complicated arrangements are easily built remembering your vector algebra.
To create a book from all the maps and to add the necessary stuff around them TeX was used. The Un*x make utitility was used to make the process of building the book from all those source files a less tedious expierience.

Licensing

Alas one has to add a section for this, too. But we will keep it short. The atlas as well as all its source files has been published under the terms of the 'GNU Free Documentation License' (GFDL). The license basically says that you can do with the atlas whatever you fancy (including printing and ritually burning it) except publishing it under another license.

The actual text can be found at the Free Software Foundation's web site: GNU Free Documentation License.

Helping

Due to its very early stage the atlas contains a lot of mistakes. Also there are some lines and stations amiss especially those that have been closed a long time ago. Because I cannot buy or even read all the books published on all the lines I will not know of this.

So I would be very happy if everybody who finds mistakes or missing things would report this. I also like to hear from you if you have some comments or even criticism. All of this should be e-mailed to Martin Hoffmann <hn@nvnc.de>.

Last updated on 06 May 2004. Maintained by Martin Hoffmann. Please mail your comments, suggestions, and corrections to atlas@nvnc.de. URL: http://www.nvnc.de/de-netz/atlas/about.en.html