Wow. Just wow. These amazing transit maps of early 20th Century Berlin are just a few samples of the maps that can be found at the BerlinerVerkehr website – an absolute treasure trove that transit geeks like me can easily lose hours to. Five stars for this collection, obviously!
All of these maps are of interest, but there’s a few things that really stand out:
The “Hoch-und Untergrundbahn” logo used on the 1914 and 1918 maps closely echoes the similar “London Underground” logo of the same time period.
The clearly diagrammatic nature of some of the maps, even as early as 1923 (ten years before Beck’s London Underground diagram!). The 1926 U-Bahn map eschews geography completely, while the 1931 S-Bahn map – with its stylised and perfectly circular Ring Line – looks almost modern in its approach.
The 1930 Railways and S-Bahn map is actually a historical overview of the history of the network to that date, with colour coding delineating which years certain lines were built in.
As a direct contrast to my previous post, here’s the East Berlin perspective of transit in that divided city. Notice anything? West Berlin has almost been entirely excised from the map: a small, empty, featureless area totally encircled by extensive East German rail lines as well as the Berlin Wall:…
Another amazing historical map from that most fascinating of transit map cities, Berlin. This one shows the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks of East Berlin in July 1988, just over a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. West Berlin is entirely omitted, with the S-Bahn ending at Friedrichstrasse with…
Berlin’s troubled post-World War II history led to a fascinating dual history for transit in that city, divided into East and West sectors. This West Berlin U-Bahn map from 1977 – at the height of the Cold War – shows that division in a stark, but also curiously understated fashion.…