Making a Market: Infrastructure, Integration, and the Rise of Innovation

We exploit exogenous variation arising from the historical rollout of the Swedish railroad network across municipalities to identify the impacts of improved transport infrastructure on innovative activity. A network connection led to a local surge in patenting due to an increased entry and productivity of inventors. As the railroad network expanded, inventors in connected areas began to develop ideas with applications outside the local economy, which were subsequently sold to firms along the network. Our findings suggest that reductions in communication and transportation costs were an important driver of the historical emergence of a market for ideas.

Constructing a model for the automated operative planning of local operations at railroad technical stations

This paper has investigated the technology of forwarding local wagons at railroad technical stations and established the need to improve it given the extra downtime of local wagons. The main issue relates to the considerable combinatorial complexity of the tasks of operational planning. Another problem is that as part of the conventional approach, planning a station operation and planning a local operation at it is considered separately. Another planning issue is the lack of high-quality models for the preparation of initial data, in particular, data on the duration of technological operations, such as, for example, shunting operations involving local wagons forwarding. To resolve these issues, a new approach has been proposed, under which the tasks of operative planning of a technical station’s operation and its subsystem of local operations are tackled simultaneously, based on a single model. To this end, a mathematical model of vector combinatoric optimization has been built, which uses the criteria of total operating costs and wagon-hours spent at a station when forwarding local wagon flows, in the form of separate objective functions. Within this model, a predictive model was constructed in the form of a fuzzy inference system. This model is designed to determine the duration of shunting half-runs when executing the spotting/picking operations for delivering local wagons to enterprises’ goods sheds. The model provides for the accuracy level that would suffice at planning, in contrast to classical methods. A procedure has been devised for optimizing the planning model, which employs the modern genetic algorithm of vector optimization NSGA-III. This procedure is implemented in the form of software that makes it possible to build a rational operative plan for the operation of a technical station, including a subsystem of local operations, in graphic form, thereby reducing the operating costs by 5 % and the duration of maintenance of a local wagon by 8 %. The resulting effect could reduce the turnover time of a freight car in general on the railroad network, speed up the delivery of goods, and reduce the cost of transportation

Book Review : SEJARAH KERETA API YOGYAKARTA 1917-1942 (HISTORY OF YOGYAKARTA RAILWAYS 1917-1942)

The Book Sejarah Kereta Api Yogyakarta 1917-1942 was published as a complement to reading about the railroad network that had existed in the kingdom during the colonial period. In addition, this book is a means of education for the public that trains are not just transportation for mobility from one place to another. However, trains can be a vital element and influence the social, economic, political and cultural conditions in a society. The author also hopes that today's society will not forget about the great contribution that the railroad network has made.

Development of simulation model for evaluating operational performance of railroad networks

Railroads move freight traffic on their network based on an overall operations plan that includes blocking, train formation, and train scheduling plans. The optimization of these operations over the entire network is integral to maximizing efficiency and minimizing costs. This thesis develops a simulation model for analyzing various operation plans of a railroad network along with guidelines for establishing a comprehensive operations plan. The objective is to move all freight on the network with minimal cost. With the model simulation and comparison of several operation plans can be performed to determine the 'best case' plan. The model implements a discrete state, deterministic simulation approach. The user-friendly software for implementation of the model was programmed in VBA and Excel. Application of the model is demonstrated using a hypothetical railroad network. The results show that the model is an effective tool in evaluating various scenarios and helping in determining the best plan.

Railroads and Reform: How Trains Strengthened the Nation State

This paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies.

Modelling Reachability in Transport Networks: Using Alternative Visual Representations in Interactive Linked‐Views to Gain Valuable Insights

Most people use maps for navigation. Geographic maps visually represent physical distance between locations. These maps sometimes provide a false impression of travel times. Two cities geographically close to each other might be “far apart” in terms of travel time because of slower connections, whereas two cities geographically distant might be “nearby” in terms of travel time because of faster connections. Under such circumstances, visualizing a transport network using time as a distance measure can make the transport network more understandable. This study integrates several (carto)graphic representations—a time line, a distance line, a time prism, a time cartogram, and a geographic map—in an interactive linked-views environment to model reachability in transport networks. A prototype is implemented in a web environment using D3.js. The implementation can be applied to any transport network. In this research, the approach is illustrated with railroad network data for the Dutch province of Overijssel. The solution provides an alternative and insightful perspective for analyzing the data. In addition to complementing a wide variety of methods to visualizing travel times, the approach could be applied in areas such as spatial analysis and transport planning.

Railroad Integration and Uneven Development on the European Periphery, 1870–1910

This study explores the relationship between railroad integration and regional development on the European periphery between 1870 and 1910, based on a regional data set including 291 spatial units. Railroad integration is proxied by railroad density, while per capita GDP is used as an indicator of economic development. The period under study is of particular relevance as it has been associated with the second wave of railroad construction in Europe and also coincides with the industrialization of most of the continent. Overall, we found that railroads had a significant and positive impact on the growth of per capita GDP across Europe. The magnitude of this relationship appears to be relatively modest, but the results obtained are robust with respect to a number of different specifications. From a geographical perspective, we found that railroads had a significantly greater influence on regions located in countries on the northern periphery of Europe than in other outlying areas. They also helped the economies of these areas to begin the process of catching up with the continent’s industrialized core. In contrast, the regions on the southern periphery showed lower levels of economic growth, with this exacerbating the preexisting divergence in economic development. The expansion of the railroad network in them was unable to homogenize the diffusion of economic development and tended to further benefit the regions that were already industrialized. In most of the cases, the capital effect was magnified, and this contributed to the consolidation of newly created nation-states.

House by the road: estate, dacha, railway in historical and literary aspects (19 – early 20 century)

The study highlights relationship between changes in material culture (development of railroad network), social infrastructure (spread of dacha villages) and poetics of literary works in Russia of the second half of the 19th – early 20th c., addressing “dacha topos”. The paper draws on the texts, which introduce railroad as a symbol of destruction of traditional values under the pressure of bourgeois “industrialism” and pernicious “infernalityˮ (А. М. Zhemchuzhnikov, F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, A. S. Serafimovich, А. А. Blok and others). The author shows that dacha, wrought by railroad civilization, is conceptualized as part of packed, petty-bourgeois, low-minded and soulless city as opposed to country estate as a lone “paradise on earth” and hermitage of high culture (А. P. Tchekhov, N. А. Leykin, А. P. Kamensky and others). The paper draws attention to metamorphoses of artistic time in passing from “estate topos” with inherent temporal static and cycliсity to “dacha topos” with precipitous and irreversible unfolding in time. The author concludes that the changes in artistic topics and temporality when addressing successive phenomena of estate and dacha are largely due to such new details of subjective figurativeness as the railroad and its attributes (locomotive, rails, wagons, anonymous passengers, travel speed etc.).