France is starting to reopen after its COVID-19 shutdown. This map shows the Métro stations that will be closed on reopening day. It seems the criterion in selecting which stations will be open and which ones closed is to try to avoid overcrowding. Map from Le Parisien, based on this map from the RATP (link no longer active – Cam).
Transit Maps says:
While I appreciate the intentions of the newspaper in publishing this map, it’s unfortunately not great. The naming of stations seems to be almost random, with only a few of the 60 stations that will be closed earning labels, while some – but not all – of the terminus stations get ridiculously enormous bold labels. It’s not too bad in the end, because the article that this graphic accompanies lists all of the closures line by line, but it’s still a curious approach. One wonders why they don’t just point their readers to the official RATP map?
Speaking of which, the layout of this little diagram actually matches the RATP map exactly (I overlaid them in Photoshop to check), so it would seem that the newspaper’s designers just used that as a basis for theirs. It’s really instructive to note how random and disorganized the network looks without the familiar path of the Seine running through the city.
In between writing this blog, designing my own maps, and digitally restoring vintage maps, I also like to map out old, forgotten streetcar and electric interurban networks in Google Maps. I mainly do it because I want to compile information from various sources into one place and build my own coherent understanding of the networks that once existed.
Having done a few of these maps now, I thought I’d share a few tips on how I go about it and some of my favourite “go-to” resources on the internet for this type of research. Note that these tips are tailored for research in the United States, but similar resources may exist regardless of where you are located.
First off, it goes without saying that Google is your friend here. Bombard it with all the search queries you can think of – all the variants for operating names of the rail companies you’re interested in, dates, city names, streetcar/trolley/interurban, etc. It’s probably going to return lots of little, unconnected bits of information, but sometimes you’ll get lucky and get most of what you’re after in terms of the general history of the company, the names of some of the routes, and maybe even a rough map or two, like this one for the Boise interurban loop. Normally, you won’t get enough from this to plot anything on top of a Google street map, but it’s great for context and history and some station names you can use as additional search queries.
To really be able to plot things properly, you’re going to need maps that come from the time period that you’re trying to map, and the more you can find, the better. My first port of call these days is historical county atlases, and Historic Map Works has a wide selection of them. Just choose your state and then see if there’s a county atlas or gazette for the area and time frame you’re after. Here in the Pacific Northwest, there’s almost always a Metsker Maps atlas available, which is fantastic. Generally, these atlases break the whole county down into page-sized chunks (great for interurbans) and have separate maps for urban areas (which can help with streetcars). Do note that they’re not always totally accurate: the 1932 atlas for Umatilla County, Oregon completely omits the Walla Walla Valley Traction Company’s branch line from Milton-Freewater to Umapine, even though it had been in operation for eight years by that point.
Historical topographical maps can also be useful, but can be very hit-and-miss as to whether there’s one at the right scale and time period to show what you’re after. If you want to quickly look through what’s available, the USGS TopoView website is your best bet. Simply type in the name of the city you’re after or drop a pin on the map and it’ll give you a list of all the historical topographic maps for that area. You can overlay them on the map on the site and even adjust opacity to see both maps at the same time. Neat!
Other good places to find historical maps: County and City archives websites, historical society and museum websites, university archives (especially for rural universities, which often act as historical repositories for their local area), and sometimes even personal blogs from people who are similarly interested in these things. A few examples: this 1929 map of Walla Walla County came from the Washington State University Library, and gave me most of the names of stations on the interurban line to Milton-Freewater. The fantastic track engineering blueprint below came directly from the Yakima Valley Trolley Museum website and was invaluable in piecing together how the line north of Selah ran.
Sometimes however, you just get completely lucky. For example, I wasn’t getting anywhere with working out the path of the Umapine branch mentioned above – I knew it had existed once upon a time, and where it started and ended, but nothing else. Then I stumbled by chance upon a directory of old railroad maps on the Umatilla County Surveyor’s website and there was the blueprint for the line, showing absolutely everything I needed to know. In the end, it was narrowing my search terms down to look for a specific and distinctive station name – Prunedale – along the line that led me to what I was after. So, be persistent and precise!
If you can find them or have access to them, the Official Guide to the Railways can be useful as well. Larger systems often have a rudimentary map, and even smaller ones usually have a timetable with a helpful list of station names. I have PDFs of the Guides for 1910, 1921, 1923 and 1930 on my hard drive and refer to them a lot.
When it comes to actually plotting your lines onto your base Google Map, there are two tricks I use all the time. In urban areas, zoom in until you can see tax lot boundaries. A surprising amount of the time, the old railroad right of way can still be discerned, winding its way invisibly through the city. You can also look out for giveaway street names like “Electric Avenue” or “Depot Street”. In rural areas, try switching to satellite mode – the right of way often leaves a distinctive scar across the landscape that’s easy to track.
That’s pretty much it from me. Do you have any research tips, tricks or resources that I haven’t mentioned? Have you researched and made your own map? Leave a comment below if you’ve got something to add!
This interesting little diagram was posted on Twitter recently and brought to my attention by some of my followers.
Its owner, Moritz Bernoully, said that it was purchased with a little plastic wallet from a vendor in the Mexico City Metro in 2012 (just before Line 12 opened and made this diagram redundant), and he doesn’t think that it’s an officially-produced diagram because of that provenance. It certainly looks cheaply made, as it’s just one-colour printing on a small sheet of paper.
Despite that single colour, this little diagram makes a truly heroic effort to depict the massive Metro network, using large numbers and all the possible tints of purple that it can to differentiate between all the lines as best it can. Most routes can be followed with a little bit of effort, though some are harder than others (Line 1’s route gets a little hazy as it winds its way across the centre of the diagram, for example).
The diagram is mainly notable for its use of the famous Mexico City Metro icons for termini and interchange stations, which is actually pretty smart thinking. It’s something that the official map could consider, in my opinion. Some of the icons don’t reproduce that well in tints of purple, but it’s enough to get the idea across. The other bit of “out of the box” thinking is the use of a space-saving star glyph in the station name “Cerro de la Estrella” – clever!
Our final word: While this diagram isn’t going to win any design awards, it’s simple, compact and does a lot of hard work with very limited materials. Two-and-a-half stars.
Here at Transit Maps, we love a good cutaway diagram of station layouts, and this one is a classic. Sent our way by David Auerbach, it shows the combined Paris Métro/RER Châtelet–Les Halles complex in Paris – a transit hub so massive that Métro Line 4 has two separate stations within it!
On this diagram, the white SNCF tunnels shown as “en projet” correspond to the modern RER Line D, which began service in 1987 using the centre platforms on the RER level. Of course, the station is even more complicated these days with the additional Métro platforms for Line 14 jammed in between the Châtelet platforms for Lines 1 and 4!
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This latest version of the diagram now features correct geographic orientation at junctions. The previous maps were nodal (major stations were shown as hubs where trains can arrive and depart in any direction, sometimes reversing) to keep straight line trajectories as long as possible. See the Southampton example for then and now. The map is now more curvy with a softer less angular appearance which I believe users will prefer. Careful control of radii at junctions has helped keep the long straight line trajectories. Now it’s been given the full go ahead, HS2 phase 2b has been added. A new colour palette enables high speed to be picked out showing how the HS2 fits into the existing network. The map is a major development and to make it appear new and different I’ve used a more artistic sea abstract with rounded corners to the coastline.
Transit Maps says:
First, let me just recognise what an enduring project this is – Andrew’s first draft of this map dates back to 1997, and this is its thirtieth major revision, which is quite astounding. Andrew also makes a version that breaks everything up by rail operator, but I’ve always felt that this “overview” version is a little cleaner and easier to understand. Displaying an entire national rail network in a clean diagrammatic way is no easy task, but I think Andrew does a great job and each revision sees improvements.
I particularly like the new colour palette this time around: the teal and orange are quite striking, and the use of the the orange for icons instead of the previous grey is quite inspired. I’m not as sold on the wavy background, though: it’s overly busy and draws attention away from the actual diagram. If it was overlaid at a much lighter opacity on a light blue background as a subtle effect I think I’d like it more. The large black drop shadow is also a bit too powerful for me – reduce the radius, drop the opacity or make it a multiplied blue to reduce its visual intensity and brighten the map up a bit.
With this revision, Andrew has introduced more generous curves throughout, which does help with comprehension of some of the local routes. It also introduces a bit of a visual “pause” in some of the longer straight routes: the eyes naturally rest on Exeter St. Davids on the way out to Penzance, for example. I quite like it, and it’s definitely interesting to compare the approach taken by this map to the previous iteration in this detail from around Southampton. It just seems a little more elegant, perhaps?
One thing I always look for in a big mapping project like this is consistency in the design language. One thing that really stands out to me is Andrew’s use of large arcs in just two parts of the map: between Aberdeen and Inverness in Scotland, and between Barrow-in-Furness and Carlisle skirting around the edge of the Lake District. They look great, but are also somewhat inconsistent with the angularity of the rest of the map. So I think that it’d be nice if similar arcs could be incorporated elsewhere to make their use more consistent. The obvious first place for me would be the line between Colchester and Stowmarket – which is basically already an arc except it’s made up out of straight segments – and there may be others as well.
Overall though, this is a really good new iteration of an already impressive project and I can’t wait to see what Andrew does with it next. Definitely one to spend a long time poring over!
Note that even though this isn’t technically an official National Rail map, it does appear on the National Rail Enquiries website directly below the official ones – which allows for an easy comparision between them.
Sound Transit’s network will expand rapidly in the near future – with new Link light rail lines, extensions to the Tacoma Link streetcar and Sounder commuter rail, as well as the new Stride BRT lines along SR 523/SR 522 and I-405. With all these new services, Sound Transit has to come up with a way to identify all of them on future maps.
Originally, the current Link light rail spine was going to be renamed as the Red Line, with future lines gaining new colours as they came online. However, the local community was quick to point out the similarity of that name to the racist practice of redlining, where people of colour were denied loans or insurance, defining where in a city they could live. Though Sound Transit acknowledges that there are many other Red Lines around the world, they also chose to act decisively and change their plans at this early stage.
So now we have five Link lines – four of which will be numbered as the main network, while the separate Tacoma Link streetcar will be the “T Line”. The Stride network will get an “S” prefix before their numbers, and the Sounder lines will become the “N Line” and “S Line” after the directions trains travel out of Seattle. To show off this new system, Sound Transit has made this nifty little animated GIF showing how the network will change over time as each new component comes on line. Neat!
The colours actually work well when placed together on the map, and Sound Transit says that though has gone into making them user-friendly for colour-blind readers, which is good to hear. The other thing to note is that there’s still 21 years to go until the system is built out fully, which is like FOREVER.
I’m not quite sure how I missed this one when Michael posted it to Twitter back at the beginning of March, because it’s really quite wonderful. It seems to be based on a 1959 proposal by O. Roy Chalk – the then owner of D.C. Transit – for a monorail system. Chalk considered traditional rail as obsolete, while monorail represented the future: “beautiful, silent-operating… suspended on graceful pylons for the most part.” You can read more about Chalk’s plans over here at Greater Greater Washington.
Chalk’s plan was light on details, and wasn’t seriously considered at the time. But what if it had been? This is the question that Michael’s map seems to ask, and shows the network in its fully built-out form, dating it to the mid-to-late 1960s in this alternate reality. I have to say that Michael’s absolutely nailed the mid-century American design aesthetic: big, bold, extended sans serif typography; and limited colours with overprinting used very effectively to extend the palette’s range. I love the rough halftones used for the waterways: they really add to the overall look and feel.
Our final word: A great “what if” map that absolutely looks the part. I love it!
Made a map of the public transport network in Gothenburg, Sweden. The official one (August 2018, 3 stars) just doesn’t look very good I think.
Transit Maps says:
This is a lovely effort, Jens – the map certainly seems to relate the tram line routes to the real world far better than the official map, which is stretched vertically quite a lot (to fit a required space?). The typography is very clean and friendly, and the beige background is much warmer and cheerier than the drab grey of the official map. Calling out Brunnsparken as the main transit hub with a bold circle interchange works well: it certainly draws the reader’s eye to it!
The one main problem with the map is the white Line 1, which almost completely disappears into the light background. Although I’m not normally a proponent of this approach, this line really needs to be cased with a darker colour (maybe a darker version of the background rather than black) to allow sufficient contrast with the background. Or maybe Jens just forgets about the line colour inherited from the official map and assigns it another one?
The map could also do with a better legend which names all the lines and the termini that they run between properly, and maybe explains why bus line 55 is green when all the others are brown. What’s special about it? Don’t assume that the reader knows!
Keep an eye on consistency regarding where line number bullets are placed at the terminus stations: in most locations, the numbers are placed nearest the stations, except at Mölndal, where they’re placed after the station name.
The coastline and rivers looks a little rough and unfinished in comparison to the rest of the map, but this is a fairly minor complaint.
Our final word: Rather pleasant to look at, very warm and welcoming. Definitely shows why very few transit networks have a “White Line” – so problematic!
This is the official transit map of Belluno, Italy, made by the provider of the service, Dolomitibus. It represents the 8 bus lines operating in Belluno, each with its own color: A=Orange (Arancio), B=Blue, C=Light Blue (Celeste), etc…
It’s extremely schematic, as it’s far from the real paths buses follow. For example, the Blue and the Green lines are, in the upper half of the map, represented as adjacent lines, while they actually run on different streets. It’s also missing some stops. I leave the more artistic part for you to review.
I dislike it so much I created my own version, and since the current system is very poor and messy I created a “project” map of how the lines should be. I will submit both of these at later times.
Transit Maps says:
I’m definitely interested to see what Luca’s vision for this network is, as this map is a bit of a mess. Schematic bus maps are a tricky thing to pull off successfully, as bus maps normally require more spatial relationship to the real world than less. This diagram makes a valiant effort by blocking out all the comunes surrounding Belluno in tints of the relevant line colours, but it’s just not very successful or aesthetically appealing. Tinted yellow labels on a tinted yellow background are almost unreadable, for example.
The Piave River, which should be a major landmark in orienting users on the map, just meanders across the page and barely resembles its real-world self. Worse still, the Borgo Piave – Distributore Agip stop on the “C” and “J” lines is shown on the wrong side of the river (it should be on the south bank)!
If there’s one thing I do like about the map, it’s the line naming convention where the line letter comes the first letter of the corresponding colour in Italian. A = Ariancio (orange), C= Celeste (light blue), etc. Simple and sweet.
Our final word: Not great. Too schematic for its own good, confusing and unattractive. 1 star.
I recently completed an unofficial map of Roaring Fork Transportation Authority winter bus service in Aspen, Colorado (80 x 40 cm, Affinity Designer). I decided to take on this project in response to the official maps’ collective failure to portray the system’s Upvalley services. RFTA’s system map lacks detail south of Brush Creek and directs the viewer to a nonexistent “Aspen inset,” and the City of Aspen’s bus map shows no cohesion with RFTA’s map, let alone route legibility.
Much of what I know about transit map design is from reading this blog, so I established five objectives before undertaking the project:
Show visual cohesion with RFTA’s official maps;
Depict the winter routes’ complex service patterns;
Display connections to other transit services, trails, and key gondola portals;
Reference secondary information (e.g. fares and connecting services) with restraint;
Focus on the Aspen/Snowmass/Highlands service area and refer to the official map for downvalley services.
In creating this map, I learned a lot about setting angled lines on a biaxial grid, label placement, and information hierarchy. In the end, I’m rather pleased with the outcome, and I look forward to your feedback.
Transit Maps says:
This is really, really nice work, Joseph! You’ve done a good job of not just mimicking the official RFTA style, but perhaps even improving upon it a bit – all your labels are set horizontally, for example. The route lines are laid out clearly and neatly, and the one-direction-only stops are quickly identifiable. I particularly like the inclusion of ski area gondolas as “routes” on the map: a nice touch for a winter services map in Aspen!
The four purple Snowmass routes are perhaps the hardest to work out, and I think an “SMI” bullet at Brush Creek would definitely help people understand that it’s just a short shuttle route between Snowmass and Brush Creek. I also think that unless the colours used are taken from official sources, you might explore using brighter colours for the City of Aspen services and more pastelly colours for the Regional services, just to be able to tell them apart a bit more easily at first glance. Thematic colour can be a powerful tool on a map like this!
Another thing to try might be a slightly more organic look for the rivers running through the valley: they look a bit too much like subsidiary route lines at the moment and could be better differentiated if possible.
Our last word: Really quite wonderful. Great work, Joseph!
