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Silly rail planning question

This is a totally silly, frivolous question, but it's how my mind works once in a while, so go ahead! Tell me how dumb it is. But if you can answer it, I'd love to hear from you! It stems from the fact that I'm a visual learner. I can read timetables on screen and in books (I have Cook's European Timetable now), but frankly, I do a lot better interpreting timetable data if I can see it in a bar graph sort of format. Where each line is a trip displayed as a bar along a time scale, in proportion to the duration of each trip. Does anyone happen to know of any online travel planning software or website where you could input the depart/arrive times of various trips and have it displayed in that fashion? I'm aware that with an inordinate amount of effort I could maybe force Excel to do something like that, but I'd rather use a canned program instead, if I could find one! Silly, huh?!

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19109 posts

"I'm aware that with an inordinate amount of effort I could maybe force Excel to do something like that" I just set up in a few minutes a simple chart with Excel using 4 ICEs from Munich to Ffm as a horizontal bar chart, just the start and end times, no intermediate stops. The first bar was the start time, the second bar the elapsed time. Unfortunately, although you can estimate the end time from the grid lines on the chart, you can't read the exact time as a written number. I'm not aware of a canned program, but then I've never really looked for one. It's always been easier for me to set up something on Excel, where I have the freedom to format it the way I want to. The trouble I find with canned programs is that they never do something quite the way I want it done. In the past, I've done something similar with an X-Y or line graph for trains of different type taking different times when I wanted to see visually what train I might want to take depending on what time I could leave.