StopsGB: Structured Timeline of Passenger Stations in Great Britain

Michael Quick's book _Railway Passenger Stations in Great Britain: a Chronology_ offers a uniquely rich and detailed account of Britain's changing railway infrastructure. Its listing of over 12,000 stations allows us to reconstruct the coming of rail at both micro- and macro-scales. However, being published originally as a book (and subsequently online as a PDF created from an underlying MS Word document), this resource was not well suited for systematic linking to other data. We now present a new, automatically generated dataset that provides the rich detail of this exceptional resource in a structured format. Each station described in the _Chronology_ is given certain attributes, such as operating companies and opening and closing dates, and is georeferenced and linked---whenever possible---to its corresponding entry on Wikidata. We name this structured, linked, and georeferenced dataset 'StopsGB' (Structured Timeline of Passenger Stations in Great Britain), and we make it openly available. We believe this dataset (and the method used to create it) will be of widespread interest across the historical, digital library and semantic web communities, and that it will be a key resource for ongoing research into the impact of the railway in Great Britain.