Long-time readers might remember Nick’s fantasy Connecticut transit system (April 2015), so it’s nice to see a new “companion piece” from him that reflects the real world situation of the not-too-distant future when the Hartford Line opens in early 2018.
As most of the rail in Connecticut runs along the chiefly east-west Northeast Corridor, Nick has come up with the rather clever idea of rotating the whole map 30 degrees counter-clockwise, which allows him to place his station labels far more efficiently than if the lines just ran horizontally across the map. The rotated angle also gives a nice dynamic energy to the whole map, which I find quite pleasing.
If it was me, though, I’d nudge all the labels along the main trunk up and to the right just a tad. As it stands, the label for the next station up the line almost sits on the same horizontal axis as the lower station’s dot, which could cause some readers to misinterpret which label belongs to which station, especially in the more crowded parts of the map. It’s certainly nowhere near as bad as the recent terrible Washington DC strip maps, but why take chances?
Nick’s map shows the different Connecticut-serving services efficiently, wisely breaking the New Haven Line into New York up into its separate branches, which has the added benefit of showing how the Waterbury Branch operates (almost entirely) as a shuttle service. His cased “peak service only” line is a little difficult to make out at smaller reproduction sizes: perhaps the central white stroke needs to be just a little thicker? I like the inclusion of connecting CT Fastrack BRT and Amtrak services to complete the “bigger picture”.
Nick’s used the Google Font Roboto for his map, which is nice and clean and has a very “DIN-like” feel to it. It perhaps doesn’t gel that well with the appropriated official CT Rail branding, but Nick seems to indicate that an imaginary rebrand is in the works, so perhaps this is only temporary.
Overall, this is very solid work by Nick, with a good solution to the problem of having the majority of the stations arranged along one axis.
Source: Nick’s project website