Empirical analysis of a scale-free railway network in China

We present a detailed, empirical analysis of the statistical properties of the China Railway Network (CRN) consisting of 3915 nodes (train stations) and 22259 edges (railways). Based on this, CRN displays two explicit features already observed in numerous real-world and artificial networks. One feature, the small-world property, has the fingerprint of a small characteristic shortest-path length, 3.5, accompanied by a high degree of clustering, 0.835. Another feature is characterized by the scale-free distributions of both degrees and weighted degrees, namely strengths. Correlations between strength and degree, degree and degree, and clustering coefficient and degree have been studied and the forms of such behaviors have been identified. In addition, we investigate distributions of clustering coefficients, topological distances, and spatial distances.