A lovely little black and white version of the Tube map at the front of a 1948 year diary. Drawn by H.C. Beck (see his name at the bottom left), it shows the central area of London only and is based off the 1946 version of the full map. By 1949, interchanges were being drawn with a white connector line between adjacent circles, rather than the separate circles seen here. Source: hollandfamilyarchives/Flickr
Not the first Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice of Fire transit map I’ve seen, but definitely the best designed. It was created by Michael Tyznik, who also made this great fantasy map of Columbus (May 2012, 4 stars). I do detect the influence of my TGV Routes of France map in this work – the general station symbology, the curved routes lines out of King’s Landing and the use of colour coding to define […]
A printer’s proof of the first card folder (pocket) edition of Beck’s famous diagram, with edits and corrections marked in his own hand. Of note is the use of quite ugly and overpowering “blobs” instead of the now-ubiquitous “ticks” for station markers, and the fact that the map has been entirely hand-lettered by Beck, using what he called “Johnston-style” characters. He’s cheated quite a bit with his letterforms and spacing on some of the longer […]
Submitted by 1993matias, who says: Hi there! I am a big admirer of your reckless slaughter of bad maps – and the praise of the good ones. But, the map you got for the Copenhagen S-train network (reviewed way back in November 2011, 3 stars) is not the best you could have gotten. This one above is the official one at all stations in the area. It has that sleek feel as the other map, […]
No seriously: a museum devoted to ramen (in all honesty, it actually sounds pretty awesome). This map is found on the main floor of the museum, where nine restaurants serve different styles of ramen from Japan and around the world in a faithfully recreated Japanese streetscape from 1958 – the year that instant ramen was invented. As to which transit system it represents, I can’t even begin to guess. The original post on Flickr posits […]
As a functional map, this is pretty much useless, as it just looks like giant balls of yarn are unravelling across Incheon and Seoul. Source: leonardo.bonanni/Flickr
Via ddotdc: WMATA planning map, dated March 1, 1968 and last revised by the WMATA Board on June 11, 1970. Please view a full-size, searchable version of the map. (Navigational tools are at the bottom of the map.) On March 1, 1968, WMATA officially adopted a 97.2 mile regional system in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. On February 7, 1969, WMATA revisited the rapid rail plan and relocated three of the stations, calling instead […]
It’s Batman Day! (Who knew, right?) In honour of the world’s greatest detective, here’s a strangely familiar transit map that was used as a prop during filming of “The Dark Knight Rises”. And here’s a link to a great article on Smithsonian.com about the surprisingly well-defined and official geography of Batman’s hometown. Also: this. Source: New Jersey Star-Ledger
Here’s a great map that shows the rapid transit of Frankfurt am Main in Germany at an interesting point in its development. The Citytunnel that carried lines S1 through S6 under the central part of the city had opened just four years prior to this, and the bridge over the Main that carried the new S14 and S15 lines was constructed in 1980. The year after this map was produced, the Citytunnel was extended from […]
I’ve already featured an excellent unofficial map of Istanbul’s transit network by Kerim Bayer (June 2012, 4 stars), but here’s a new one that’s worthy of some attention. First, let’s note that Istanbul’s transit network has expanded considerably in the last couple of years, and there’s now finally a rail connection across the Bosphorus, as well as a new Metro bridge over the Golden Horn (with a station in the middle of the span, no […]
