What is dk.trackmap.net?

There is no money involved in dk.trackmap.net (except that I pay an ISP out of my own pocket for a DSL line for the server). I am not affiliated with any railway or organization in the railway trade. I hope that you will enjoy the maps and find them interesting.

Feel free to email me with general praise or comments about the collection. However, if you want to know how you get from point A to point B by train, there are easier ways to find out than emailing me. Since you're reading this on the web, you can look up your journey on Hafas just as easily as I can. People who nevertheless mail me "please tell me when the train goes from from Copenhagen to Odense" type questions may receive either harsh language or actual help in return, depending on my mood and the general level of stupidity exhibited.

Editorial principles

From time to time, people suggest that I add more information to the maps, such as line distances, track numbers, interlocking types, signal placements etc. I try to be careful about adding new features which may confuse the maps further, but the jury is still out on most of the questions. You can influence the decision by mailing me your thoughts.

What was that place called, again?

Danish	English	Comment
København	Copenhagen	The capital. Seat of government, winter hive of the Queen, home of your friendly track map collection editor.
Helsingør	Elsinore	City north of Copenhagen, which, contrary to what Shakespeare says, was never the capital.
Sjælland	Zealand	The island where most of Copenhagen lies. I'm not sure whether "Zealand" is a correct form in English. Complain if you see it used on my pages.
Nordsjælland	Northeastern Sjælland	Don't ask.
Jylland	Jutland	The peninsula to the west which borders on Germany.
Nordjylland	North Jutland
Sydjylland	South Jutland
Østjylland	East Jutland
Vestjylland	West Jutland
Fyn	Funen	The larger of the islands between Jylland and Sjælland.
Storebælt	Great Belt	The sea between Sjælland and Fyn

How the maps are made

Most commonly, though, the maps are composed form direct observation. I go out to the railways with a sketchpad and a pair of binoculars, and scribble down the track layout while riding the line a couple of times. At the larger stations I disembark and inspect by foot from platforms and (hopefully) public bridges over the track areas. Occasionally some complex part of the layout goes over the streets instead of under them; in that case it might be necessary to ride the trains many times before I have a reliable approximation of the layout.

Very recently I have dragged myself kicking and screaming into the 21st century and bought a digital camera. Taking pictures is faster than doing sketches in the field. On the other hand, the paper-based approach still seems to work best for from-the-train observations, where sidings go past faster than I can aim the camera at them. I am experimenting with having the camera record video out of the train window, but that requires knowing in advance that interesting trackage will come past.

Many of the data for Jutland have been collected by local contributors who sent me sketches by email or ground mail. I suppose they do their sketching in essentially the same way as I do.

Once I acquire track map data, I spend quite some time drawing the layout into pixels, normalizing it to my lay-out conventions. In this phase I work pixel-by-pixel on the small-scale maps that are shown directly in the HTML pages. Before the great 2002-2006 hiatus I mostly did the editing in old Windows-based paint programs that could only handle 16 colors at a time; some of the uglier stylistic choices on the maps date back to the need to express everything in a fixed 16-color palette.

In recent times, however, I do the editing in the Gimp on Linux, and the master sources for all the map are now saved in the Gimp's native XCF format. After the switch to the Gimp I am gradually exploring the freedom of using more than 16 colors to give the maps a more modern graphical style.

A typical "master map" has several layers:

• A white background layer
• A layer with the actual track map
• A separate layer for the title box (which often needs to move around when I re-layout the map).
• Hidden layers for saving older variants of parts of the map that may still be handy for future re-layoutings.
• A hidden layer with markings that define the hotspots for links to the real-time timetable at bane.dk.
• A hidden layer with track numbers that get applied to the large-size variant of the map.

During the editing I make use of a home-made perl script that renders station names and other text in my house-style bi-color font. After the editing is done, a collection of various other home-made programs convert the XCF to what you actually see on the web:

• To get information out of the XCF file and into a format that other software can work with, I use xcftools. I had to write this myself, there being no other programs that could reliably extract data from an indexed XCF file. It is the only one of my post-production tools that has been wrapped up nicely in a package that should be useful for others.
• A perl script recognizes the blue-framed boxes that are used to reference neighbouring maps, and converts them to clickable links in the HTML. If the master map has an appropriately-named hidden layer, the same script extracts links to the on-line timetable for the stations on the map.
• The small map is enlarged 500% to a smooth map for printing by a somewhat chaotic subsystem of various programs that work by graphical pattern-matching. For each pixel in the original image, it and its neighbors up to 3 pixels away is compared to see whether this combination has been seen and expanded before; if so the 5×5 expansion of it is copied to the new image. There are a suite of ad-hoc optimizations that help recognize the same situation in different orientations or with different colors (for pairs of colors that have similar roles on the maps). For combinations that have not been seen before, each pixel is simply enlarged 5 times; I then edit it to be nice and smooth by hand.
  The programs that support this started out as Perl scripts (connected by a rather hackish Makefile), but most have since been rewritten in C for speed.
• The 500% enlarged bitmaps are converted to Encapsulated Postscript files by a different set of handwiritten Perl scripts (I add special markup pixels in the 500% version to help vectorizing them), and those are further converted to PDF files by ps2pdf which is part of Ghostscript.
• Track numbers, where present, are enlarged from a hidden layer in the XCF by the same mechanism. A separate program masks the track numbers into the large version of the raw map.
• Finally the various image files and the imagemap data for hotspots are automatically copied to my web server.

Other contents on dk.trackmap.net

• A brief guide to Danish signalling. This was part of my earlier site "The Railfan's Guide to Copenhagen". I stopped maintaining it several years ago because I thought others were doing a better job. But apparently there are readers who do'nt share that opinion, so I keep it around nevertheless...
• A list of Danish station name abbreviations. Its primary job is to be pointed at when someone (which may be me) on the local Usenet railway group begins to show off using abbreviations instead of the stations' perfectly good full names and some poor newbie doesn't know them.