Sent my way by Nick Stylianou, this is supposedly the new Sydney Trains system map that will be released concurrently with a whole slew of timetable changes on October 20th.

I’ll reserve my judgement until I see the final map – this may be a working draft with final amendments still to be made – but there are certainly some radical changes from the current map (Sep. 2012, 3.5 stars), not the least of which are the rebranding of lines as “T” numbers and the abolition of the Northern Line and Inner West lines as separate entities. It certainly feels weird to look at a Sydney train map without a Red Line: I spent much of my youth travelling from Epping for school and design college!

As a result, almost half the map is now dominated by one route colour: the yellow T1 line now has five separate terminus stations! Meanwhile, the tiny little Carlingford line still gets to be blue. I also feel that the terminating stations throughout the map could be referenced simply with their “T-number” designation, rather than redundantly repeating the entire line name. Inconsistently, this approach is abandoned where there’s no space – Olympic Park only gets a “T7”, and Lidcombe has no “T3” at all.

I’m not a fan of the twists that the T3 Bankstown Line has to take between Dulwich Hill and Birrong, and while I appreciate the effort taken to stylise the harbour and coastline, I feel it could be more elegantly done to match the rest of the map better.

On the positive side, the removal of intercity services gives the map much more room to breathe, and spacing of stations on the T4 Illawarra Line is now much more consistent with the rest of the map. Future works have been integrated into the map, so it’ll be able to grow with the system.

Other notes: the Metro light rail line has been removed from the map (not sure if that’s good or bad), and Homebush station is now being shown as a spur of the main T2 line… something to do with service patterns from there?

I’ll be watching for the final map with interest, that’s for sure!