Author: Cameron Booth

Historical Map: Thüringerwaldbahn Tram Mural, Tabarz, East Germany, 1989

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Historical Maps

A photo from 1989 of a newly-painted mural celebrating 60 years of the Thüringerwaldbahn, an interurban tram service running 22km between Gotha and Tabarz. As the original poster on Flickr notes, the scale of the map is “fanciful”, but it’s really meant more as a (rather lovely) decorative overview than an actual map. I’d be interested to know if the mural is still there, some 24-odd years later. Source: sludgegulper/Flickr

Historical Map: New York IRT Sytem Baseball Season Opening Map, 1923

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Historical Maps

A simple little map from “The Elevated Express” gazette showing the convenience of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company’s services to “all three parks” – Ebbets Field (Brooklyn Dodgers), Polo Grounds (New York Giants) and Yankee Stadium (New York Yankees). The last stadium is of particular interest as this is the year that it opened – the first game at Yankee Stadium was held April 18th, 1923 against the Boston Red Sox. According to the New […]

Historical Map: Montreal Tramways Company, 1941

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Here’s a very handsome map of transit in 1941 Montreal, provided by the Montreal Tramways Company, or La Compagnie des Tramways de Montreal. Despite the name, there’s also a healthy (and growing) number of bus routes on this map, shown in blue.  Cleverly, the map rotates the city away from true north in order to fit everything onto the sheet of paper allocated, and the north pointer used is simply lovely, even including the company’s […]

Historical Map: Boston Rapid Transit Map in Type 6 Mock-up Carriage, c. 1968

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Here’s a variant Boston MBTA map I’ve never seen before: a version with 60-degree angled lines, instead of 45 degrees. Apart from that, it looks very much like the standard late-1960s/early 1970s Cambridge 7 spider map, although there’s some weird inconsistencies like the Green Line “A” Watertown branch (closed 1968) and Quincy Center (opened 1971) on the same map. Here’s the interesting part. This map lives in the one and only mock-up of an MBTA […]

Tutorial: Multiple Strokes on One Path in Adobe Illustrator

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This little tip is thanks to RG, who left a comment on the site asking: “Can you comment on how you make the 2pt of white space between lines show when you have lines cross over each other?” On most transit maps, route lines will cross over each other at various points. Most of the time, an interchange station exists at that point and the symbol for that covers up the lines as they cross. […]

Historical Map: TTC System Map, Guide and Patron, December 5, 1957

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Awesome old publicity photos that seem to feature a helpful TTC guide explaining the system map to Betty Draper. Also, the illustrations around the map itself are kind of incredible. The newfangled subway has only been open for three years at this point in time. Compare to this similarly amazing TTC photo from 1966. Source: torontohistory/Tumblr – site no longer active

Tutorial: Working with 45-Degree Curves in Adobe Illustrator

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I got an request from an anon last week which asked:  “Hey! Could you do a video tutorial on how to bypass Illustrator’s annoying round corners effect in case of 45 degrees? It would be a lifesaver!” Now, while you’re not going to get a video tut out of me – I don’t have the resources, time or know-how to produce one of those – I can and will share my battle-tested personal approach to […]

Official Map: Port Authority of Allegheny County Full System Map, 2013

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While researching yesterday’s post about Pittsburgh’s light rail map, I came across this, the full system map – showing light rail, BRT (busways) and buses – produced by the Port Authority of Allegheny County and available on their website. That’s right: the map image has been sliced up into multiple .png files and placed into an HTML table. A table with a staggering fifty-one separate cells. It’s like a time warp back to 1996 or […]