Interactive visualizations exploring how railway networks
shaped settlement patterns in Saskatchewan, 1882–1920.
Explore which settlements could be reached from Saskatoon within one hour by train as the network expanded.
Watch the four major railway companies expand across Saskatchewan year by year.
Select any of the 429 settlements to discover which neighbours were reachable by train.
Visualize the railway network as an interactive graph with settlements as nodes and connections as edges.
Compare how far you could travel by walking, wagon, or railway in the same amount of time.
Compare walking, horse & cart, and railway travel times using actual railway network routes and Dijkstra's algorithm.
Watch walking, horse & cart, and railway travel between settlements to see how railways transformed travel.
Scrub through four transport eras and watch settlements shift from geographic positions through walking, horse & cart, and railway time-distance layouts.
A force-directed network showing railway expansion as a temporal gravity graph. Railway companies are pulled toward their most active building years.
Map the commercial service tier of all 429 incorporated municipalities, coloured by their position in the urban hierarchy and overlaid with the provincial railway network.
These visualizations are part of a larger research project examining Saskatchewan's historical urban settlements. The data comes from the Urban Saskatchewan History project, which documents 429 settlements from the 1921 census.
Key findings from this research:
The one-hour travel radius (40 km at 40 km/h average speed including stops) represents a practical limit for day trips and regular commerce, showing how railways enabled regional integration.