All posts filed under: Historical Maps

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

June 17, 2014
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Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Historical Map: Melbourne and Metropolitan Tramways Board – Proposals for General Scheme, 1923

June 15, 2014
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Another great planning map from almost 100 years ago. Melbourne, of course, is one city that has retained its trams over the years, rather than tearing them all out, only to eventually replace them with light rail or new trams in the modern day. trammuseum: Here’s a great map that we’ve just added to our archives today. Authored by the M&MTB’s Chief Engineer T.P. Strickland in 1923 and overlaid on a Sands & McDougall map of Metropolitan […]

Historical Map: Rapid Transit Plan by the City of Seattle, 1920

June 13, 2014
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Here’s an interesting map that shows a plan for rapid transit that city engineers envisioned for Seattle way back in 1920, almost 100 years ago! The map shows a subway running beneath Third Avenue from Virginia to Yesler, coming to the surface near the railroad stations – essentially the route followed by the present-day Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Trains going up to Capitol Hill would follow a line up Pine Street that would be alternately […]

Historical Map: PATCO Hi-Speed Line (Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey), 1983

June 6, 2014
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An odd little map from the Fall/Winter 1978 PATCO timetable brochure. While the Hi-Speed line itself is nicely shown in a lovely strong red, the absolute tangle of highways shown in New Jersey is somewhat bewildering, and really not that helpful. The other bit of strangeness is the way that the map shows highways and towns all the way out to the Atlantic coast – some 45 miles past Lindenwold, the easternmost PATCO station. The […]

Historical Map: “Visitor’s London” Tourist Map and Guide, 1959

May 30, 2014
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The inset central zone London Underground map is a black and white version of Beck’s diagram from the same year, but really, this is all about the fantastic illustrations (by Peter Roberson) and groovy mid-century graphic design. There’s only two colours used here – black and pink – but they’ve been used in a very striking and eye-catching way. I wonder what was on the reverse of this? Source: smallritual/Flickr

Historical Map: Opening of the Los Angeles Metro Red Line, January 30, 1993

May 27, 2014
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A very simple map showing the first segment of Los Angeles’ Red Line on its opening in January 1993. The Blue Line (part of which is also shown on this map) had opened three years earlier. The map is mainly notable for the “RTD” logo that belonged to the Southern California Regional Transit District, the immediate ancestor of today’s Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA, or more commonly, just “Metro”). In fact, the LACMTA […]

Photo: Old Rome–Pantano Railway Map, Italy

May 26, 2014
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Submitted by Chris Bastian. An old, out-of-date wall map of the Rome–Pantano railway. Until 2008, the line ran from the Roma Termini station out to Pantano, a suburb to the east of Rome. Since then, the line has been cut back to Giardinetti (the station near the ring road shown on this map), as the eastern portion of the line is being converted into part of the new Metro Line 3. Also of note is […]

Historical Map: 1980 Spokane Transit System Tourmap

May 23, 2014
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Check out this eye-poppingly bright bus map from Spokane, Washington, brought to my attention by Zachary Ziegler of the Transit 509 blog. Produced by a local design firm, this seems to be the first attempt at any sort of bus map in Spokane. It’s notable for the interesting way that the route lines overprint each other when they cross, which creates an interesting sort of plaid pattern where many routes meet downtown. Adorable little colour-coded […]

Historical Map: Austrian Edition of Airey’s Railway Map of London, 1876

May 20, 2014
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Simply beautiful rail line and junction map from the earliest days of what would become the London Underground. Extremely notable for its use of colour-coding to differentiate between the lines of all the different operating companies. In the days of chromolithographic printing, using this many different colours would have been an expensive, highly technical and time-consuming task. The following text is taken from the raremaps.com description of this map: Extremely rare early Austrian edition of […]