Live Inspection of Detailed Railway Data in free QGIS viewer

In a recent investigation I stumbled on two valuable things:

• the free QGIS desktop tool that allows inspection, transformation and analysis of Geo data
• the ProRail ArcGIS Map Server that provides an incredible wealth in data regarding railway tracks, crossings, train stations, signs and more

The two make a formidable pair as we shall see in this article. First we install QGIS – using a simple operating system specific installer. Then we connect QGIS to the Map Service offered by ProRail. 

Install QGIS

Install QGIS (Open Source Desktop GIS – a professional GIS application that is built on top of and proud to be itself Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)). Note: QGIS has a 1.2 GB installer download (on Windows).

Run the QGIS application.

Connect QGIS to the ProRail Map Service

The ProRail Base Map can be inspected in the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.

Data can be downloaded from MapService: https://mapservices.prorail.nl/arcgis/rest/services/ProRail_basiskaart_001/FeatureServer/query . Easier still: to visualize data from the ProRail Data Set in QGIS (and from there export it as GeoJSON data) do the following:

Click on the browser node ArcGIS REST Servers. Right mouse menu, New Connection. In the window that popups for defining the connection details, enter https://mapservices.prorail.nl/arcgis/rest/services/ProRail_basiskaart_001/FeatureServer as the URL. Press OK.

When you now expand the newly created node, you will find a number of layers to inspect.

These layers can be added to the project and will be visualized in the viewer.

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Other connections can be created for specific ProRail servers, such as

Transfer – objects close to train stations – MapServer URL: https://maps.prorail.nl/arcgis/rest/services/Transfer/MapServer ; open in ArcGIS Viewer: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=39302036f01b44c191335db5af4f58f3 .

Here we see the Perron objects (platforms) from that data set for a small part of the country. Can you guess where?

This is Utrecht CS – and smattering of Vaartsche Rijn, Utrecht Zuilen, Utrecht Maliebaan and I guess the tram platform on the west side of CS (Jaarbeursplein).

Resources

Free QGIS The Leading Open Source Desktop GIS – QGIS is a professional GIS application that is built on top of and proud to be itself Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). – https://qgis.org/

The ProRail Base Map can be inspected in the ArcGIS Online Map Viewer.

ProRail ArcGIS Hub for browsing and downloading data sets – https://prorailnl.hub.arcgis.com/