Building a train movement graph

Question

I need to build a graph that reflects train movement for a daily period. Something like this: I've never built graphs like that. Have you any idea what I should start with? I found a graphic library `d3.js` but yet have no experience of working with it. Can you guide me a little? Thanks!

Accepted Answer

This looks like E.J. Marey's 1880's train schedule, which is on the cover of Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" and described in this blog post.

There's actually an interactive visualization of CalTrain schedules that copies Marey's visualization, built in Protovis. Though Protovis isn't actively developed any more, you may just be able to use that example.

However, as @HBP says, this kind of visualization would be pretty straightforward to build by hand without learning any specialized visualization library.

Building a train movement graph

Solution

Problem