As the PBF file for the entire of India wouldn’t load correctly in QGIS I extracted all of the bridges, dams, rivers and water towers. As processing power wouldn’t be an issue for what I was trying to do I decided to use the upper limit of 80kph for the speed of the trains. The assumption that Saroo was working on from his friend Amreen’s father was that trains travelled between 70kph-80kph in the mid-80s. He believed the town’s name began with ‘G’ and sounded liked ‘ Ginestlay’. I could proceed with the other criteria for the ‘B’-town however I felt that with a dam, bridge, river, fountain and water-tower there were enough unique entities that I could try at this stage to find the hometown without dedicating any further resources or time to the ‘B’-town. We know that Saroo’s hometown had a water tower, river, bridge, dam and a fountain in the park near the station. Now that we’ve narrowed down the number of possible ‘B’-towns to 91, the next step is to try and use the hometown criteria to find the correct location. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to take the various ways that he thought it might have been spelled (as below) and to then take the common letters from those spelling and narrow down the search that way. The above script took 15 seconds to run and it narrowed down the search field from 7,779 to 91 as shown below. Print("Finished running - the program took " + str((round((end - start), 2))) + " seconds") Iface.vectorLayerTools().stopEditing(layer) Layer.changeAttributeValue(feat.id(), 11, "No_Match") Layer.changeAttributeValue(feat.id(), 11, "Meets_Criteria") Regex_Match = Regex_arch(str(Regex_Stations_Search)) Regex_String = re.compile(pattern, re.IGNORECASE) If layer.dataProvider().fieldNameIndex("Relevant_Rail_Stations") = -1: I wrote a small script that would use the regular expression module to find stations that matched the above criteria. I used QGIS’s inbuilt python functionality, PyQGIS. I had the entire OSM database for India at my disposal so I decided that the first and easiest step to undertake was to find all the railway stations that began with ‘B’ and contained ‘p’, ‘u’ and ‘r’. I decided not to use Saroo’s methodology of using a buffer distance from Kolkata. QGIS can load the PBF files natively but the entire of India is a bit of a stretch for it regardless of computing power available.Įvery Railway Station within 1,000km of Kolkata The first items I was interested in were the railway lines and railway stations of India. I downloaded the Protocolbuffer Binary Format (PBF) file of the entire of India. If I was to try and recreate the search for Saroo’s hometown, I would need access to as much free geographical data as possible so I turned to OpenStreetMap and specifically the downloads available from Geofabrik. He started searching methodically outwards from Kolkata to try and find the station that began with ‘B’ and hopefully, then, his hometown that was about an hour away from this. Based on this Saroo calculated that he would have travelled 1,000km in that time. Her father made an educated guess that trains in India in the 1980s travelled at between 70kph-80kph. One friend in particular, Amreen whose father worked for the Indian Railway in New Delhi proved helpful. Based on this, he consulted Indian friends of his at college about how to start searching. He knew he got on the train at a station that sounded like ‘ Berampur‘ and he thought he was on the train for approximately 12-15 hours. Saroo’s methodology started with tracing his steps backwards from Kolkata. In his 20s he begins trying to find his mother and siblings in India by using Google Earth to pinpoint both the town he boarded the train and in turn his hometown. Here, against all odds he survives on the streets and eventually ends up being adopted by (from the sounds of it) a wonderful couple in Tasmania. The young Saroo wakes a little later but can find no trace of Guddu, in his panic he hops on a train looking for Guddu, the doors shut and he (over what he believes to be 12-15 hours) ends up in Kolkata (then Calcutta). Guddu leaves him on a bench in the train station to get some sleep while he goes to work. He was five years old and his brother Guddu had taken him the few hours from home to make some extra money sweeping out trains. In it he recounts his extraordinary life story of getting separated from his brother at a train station whose name began with ‘B’ a few hours from home in rural India in 1987. Recently I finished reading Saroo Brierley’s book, A Long Way Home and titled Lion in the feature film.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |