I’m loving this totally bonkers diagram of lines owned, leased or controlled by the Boston & Maine RR in 1915. An increasingly complex system of line colours combined with dashes, dots and zig-zags attempts to record all the various agreements in place for line leases and trackage rights. The B&M itself is the yellow lines to the right of the map – all the other coloured lines are lines that they have some level of control over, and the thin black lines are competitor railroads.

Production-wise, it looks like the black parts of the map have been printed onto cloth, and all the colours have been hand-painted over the top – you can see some smudges and smears in certain locations. The map also may have been amended by hand at some point: a red hatched line from Manchester to Concord has been painted over the printed matter.

Stylistically, the piece is more diagram than map with everything straightened out as much as possible, but it’s fairly primitive work. Still, the resemblance to modern colour-coded transit maps is impossible to ignore!

Source: Harvard Library Archives