Static Data visualization for Trains at Wardha Junction in Maharashtra
Objective To create a data visualization for a railway station which gives a user understanding to know about the trains passing through a particular station. If the user is traveling in a train and is at a particular station, then this kind of visualization would give her an idea of how many stops she needs to cover and how much distance has been covered so far.
For this exercise, I selected the Wardha Junction. Wardha is the next stop for the trains departing from Nagpur railway station including express and super fast trains.
Wardha railway station serves Wardha district in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is an important junction station on the following lines.
- Howrah — Nagpur — Wardha — Bhusaval — Jalgaon — Mumbai CST line
- New Delhi — Nagpur — Chennai line.
Currently, a total of 150 trains pass through Wardha Junction every week. among these trains, total 73 trains stop at Wardha Jn. 35 of them are two-way trains and only 3 are one way. Out of the 3 one way trains, one is a special train which operates only in the festival and holiday season. Trains passing through the Wardha Junction station serve most regions in India .
Historical Significance of Wardha Junction
The first train in India travelled from Mumbai to Thane on 16 April 1853. By May, 1854, Great Indian Peninsula Railway Bombay-Thane line was extended to Kalyan. Bhusawal railway station was set up in 1860 and in 1867 the GIPR branch line was extended to Nagpur.With the completion of the Kazipet-Balharshah link in 1929, Delhi was connected directly to Chennai.Before establishment of Sevagram railway station, North-South bound trains have to get their engines reversed in opposite direction which was very time consuming process. To avoid this problem, a new station for halting North-South bound trains was established in 1985, named Sevagram railway station. Since then, trains running on New Delhi-Nagpur-Chennai line halt at Sevagram railway station bypassing Wardha railway station. Due to this, passenger crowd is divided in two. Still some trains coming from Ahmedabad and going in south direction have to halt at Wardha station.
The process involved:
The data was sourced from data.gov.in as a CSV file. In the given data set, there were more than 6000 entries. So, I had to clean the data to serve my stated objective.
I calculated the number of source station and destination station of the trains which are passing through Wardha station I then sorted the data based on the number of stations remaining to reach the destination. I then geocached the GPS coordinates of the source and destination stations and plotted them on OpenStreetMap by using Tableau.
I tried a to connect rail routes in Tableau but was unable to do so and I did not get the expected results. My visualization would look like a dendrogram. So, instead to choosing to display a geospatially correct dendrogram, I made a circular one using rawgraph.io. After importing my clean data into rawgraph, I selected a circular Dendrogram. Then, I plotted my data with the related data tags so that I could get the static visualization. This was later cleaned up using adobe Illustrator
WARDHAJN/Wardha JN circular dendrogram.svg
After discussing the visualization with faculty and the classmates, I realized that a Dendrogram is probably not the best way to solve this kind of visualization problem. It looked visually very complex to comprehend and compare the data.
There is also no proper guidance to the user where to start and find the respective station Hence, it was cognitively demanding to use the visualization.
To solve the above problem I tried another approach. I used rawgraph.io to generate a Sankey diagram. Sankey Diagrams are used extensively to visualize flow data. I realized this could be a compelling way to visualize the train data I had.
The steps I followed were as follows:
Step 1 Imported my excel records into rawgraphs.
Step 2 Chose the Alluvial Diagram style
Step 3 Mapped the dimensions according to my data set.
After importing the record in rawgrpah select Alluvial Diagram Multi categorical then map your dimensions
The final data visualisation of Wardha Junction is as follows:
The graph still looks very visually dense. Hence, If we could display selective information, It would be better for comprehension. I prototyped a version as below :
