Adrien Cordonnier

For the laymen, a time-chainage diagram looks like a pick-up sticks painting. A multitude of lines of different colors. Some geometric shapes. A kind of abstract painting. Yet each line, each color and each shape has a precise meaning. Once we dive into their signification, the artistic side disappears. Hence it is unclear what interest could lead a film director to explain how to read such graphics in their masterpiece. That this film wins a Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival seems even more unlikely. And yet, it happened!                   Extract from a time-chainage diagram Time-chainage planning got its name from its first use on railways which were measured in chains. A time-chainage diagram or time-chainage in short, is very practical to plan trains moving along a railway. Most often, the railway is represented on the horizontal axis and time going down on the vertical axis. A stationary train is represented by a vertical line, a moving train by an obliq