All posts filed under: Historical Maps

Historical Map: WMATA Metro Planning Map, 1968

July 24, 2014
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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 […]

Historical Map: Frankfurt S- and U-Bahn Map, 1982

July 23, 2014
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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 […]

Submission – Historical Map, Boston Elevated Railway System, 1932

July 12, 2014
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Submitted by emotingviamemes, who says: This is an old Boston Elevated Railway Company map from a user guide I purchased at the wonderful Ward Maps store in Cambridge, MA. It’s a lovely relic of its time! The rest of the guide gives transit directions to landmarks and points of interest. I’m not exactly sure why the modern day Blue and Red Lines are the same color on here, unless some color had faded with age. […]

Historical Map: East Berlin U- and S-Bahn Map, 1988

July 5, 2014
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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 no indication of what lies further west of that point: not even a sektorengrenze. The numbers at each station indicate the travel time from the […]

Historical Map: Sydney Rail Network, Early 1980s

July 5, 2014
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The latest this can be from is 1984, as Abbatoirs station closed in November of that year. I remember versions of this above the seats on the old “red rattlers” as I travelled from Epping to Petersham for school in 1985, so they were still around after their “use by” date. In a way, this is actually one of my favourite versions of the Sydney rail map, as it has a pleasingly compact shape that […]

Historical Map: TriMet Bus and MAX Routes, Portland, Oregon (early 1990s)

June 30, 2014
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Certainly no later than 1998 as the MAX light rail only consists of the original Westside route (later to be the Blue Line). Of note is the continued use of the service zone icons – fish, rain, snow, beaver, leaf, rose and deer – that defined Portland’s downtown transit mall for decades. I’ve featured them before on this map from 1978, but it’s on this map where their main failing comes to the fore. Because […]

Historical Map: Map of Greyhound Lines and Principal Connecting Routes, 1938

June 30, 2014
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From a booklet promoting sightseeing via Greyhound’s long-distance bus lines, which sounds like an absolutely awful way to see America. However, it’s a very handsome two-colour map that certainly highlights the apparent density of the network at that time. Source: Umpqua/Flickr

Historical Map: Theoretical Diagram of Proposed Transit System, St. Louis, Missouri, 1919

June 24, 2014
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Here’s a map that hyperrealcartography would love: an audacious, almost outrageous, proposal for a transit system in St. Louis drawn up by the City Plan Commission in 1919. The final proposed system shown here would have had the existing streetcars and new rapid transit lines operating side-by-side, described like this in the full proposal: “The rapid transit system is separated into two distinct systems, that for the routing of surface cars in the downtown district, […]