I just picked up and have almost finished Edward Tufte's spectacular book on the visual display of quantitative information, the controversially titled The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Besides offering an incredible amount of insight on the creation of graphs and charts and what-have-you, the book is a fantastic showcase of beautiful statistical images.
Above is E.J. Marey's famous train schedule, which is a key graphic in the book and one that is still dramatic, stunning and useful. Many others have updated Marey's idea for modern systems (including this one for BART) and it'll be a while before I start making dents in the statistical graphics community, but I couldn't resist taking his approach for a spin.
Unfortunately for me, Caltrain doesn't stop at every single stop — except on weekends, when it runs on a perfectly regular schedule. The resulting chart isn't nearly as charmingly mountainous as Marey's, but it was very fun to create. To me, the neatest things about this design is that as long as you know it's a train schedule, understanding it doesn't really require any further explanation.
Sometime, I'd like to revisit the idea of doing the weekday schedule, but I haven't quite figured out a good way to show the train not stopping at a station. Definitely a challenge worth tackling, though. Oh, and mine is set in various weights of Albert-Jan Pool's FF DIN, which seemed somewhat trainy (technical typographical word).
Click to view larger/loosely (& incompletely) interactive version.
The way to show a train not stopping is to use a straight line as in the Marey graphic. Because even a small 5 minute stop should create a "jog" to the right in your line which indicates a stop. Checkout Stephen Few's books too. He's a Tufte follower and is also a good read.
I had considered that for myself, but I didn't realize that's what was going on in Marey's. I wonder, though, if that's a questionable solution in the case of the Caltrain system since the trains stop for under a minute, for the most part. I don't know if such a short period would be discernible.
Thanks for the Few suggestion though, I'll definitely check him out after I've gone through the other Tufte books!
On the point of rendering stopping and not stopping; why not try bullets or small discs for stops?