ArcGIS shapefile of the 6336 miles of railway lines open for public carriage of passengers and/or freight for England, Wales and Scotland in 1851. These data derive from a time dynamic GIS of the railway lines of England and Wales 1807 to 1998 which is structured so that it can generate a GIS of rail lines for any given year between these dates.
These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.
