Sunday, June 02, 2019

Name the Country from its Rail Network


Can you identify a country from its national rail network? There are nine countries/regions to identify in the image above. See how many you can get on your own before checking the answers at the bottom of this post. Hint: the individual maps are not to scale.

I created these nine mini railway maps using the OpenRailwayMap. The OpenRailwayMap uses OpenStreetMap date to map the world's railways. Using the map you can view rail infrastructure around the world for railways, subways, trams, miniature railways and funiculars.

To create the image above I used the OpenRailwayMap API. The OpenRailWayMap API allows you to simply load the OpenRailWay map tiles into a number of different interactive mapping platforms. I added the OpenRailWay map tiles to a Leaflet map. If you load the map tiles into Leaflet without adding any other map tiles you get a map of just the world's railway lines, without any other map data (for example place labels, country borders etc), which is perfect for creating a little railway network map quiz.

Answers (select text below to reveal)

Great Britain, North America (Canada, USA and Mexico), Italy

India, Spain & Portugal, Japan

Australia, France, Denmark & Norway and Sweden.


2 comments:

Paul Hutch said...

I think there's a typo in line 2.

"India, Japan, Spain & Portugal", should be India, Spain & Portugal, Japan

Assuming that's correct I got 5 right.

Keir Clarke said...

@Paul - good catch. You're right of course. Edited and now correct.