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There are some publicly available PDFs and image files of diagrams showing UK rail track layout (basically flow charts), which I want to parse to something more computer-friendly (a database perhaps, or at least just the text to start with; but keeping the arrows) - ultimately for storing in a graph database. I'm happy to do some post-processing to clean up the output, I'm just looking for some software to get started with.

There's two main formats - a png image, an example of which can be found here: https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php?title=File:TD_Map_A2.png

... or a PDF document, a screenshot of which can be found below (taken from https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php?title=File:W2_Block_Schematic.tar.gz)

TD W2 Block Schematic

I am looking for free software (ideally Windows) to get me started on this - it doesn't have to cover everything in the images, or even be 100% perfect.

Can anyone recommend something that might have a chance at doing what I need?

Note that I am interested in the relationships between nodes, rather than the spatial layout of the graphs (i.e. the x and y positions of the nodes are basically irrelevant), because it's a schematic rather than a map - if that makes sense?

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  • Does this answer your question? Reverse graph visualization
    – Saaru Lindestøkke
    Mar 5, 2020 at 17:19
  • This tool does a reverse graph visualisation, what is a very nice thing. However, probably it does not analyze the text on the image, or it interprets the fonts as graph lines. It might be or might not be what you want. Please answer here in comments, if that is what you want. If not, your question might remain long-term unanswered (such tool which would mix the rev. graph visualisation and it would do an OCR, probably does not exist yet).
    – peterh
    Mar 5, 2020 at 17:31
  • Thanks for the suggestions, but no, it's not quite what I need - the diagrams are schematic so I don't really care about analysing the physical structure but rather just gathering the nodes and connections. Perhaps there's some machine learning software that I could train to do the job?
    – simonalexander2005
    Mar 6, 2020 at 9:05

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