All posts filed under: Historical Maps

Historical Map: The Burlington Route (Chicago to San Francisco), 1879

November 6, 2013
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Here’s a beautiful map from the glory days of American railroading, showing the route from Chicago to San Francisco via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Amtrak’s modern-day California Zephyr still calls at many of the same locations between Chicago and Omaha to the east and from Elko to Oakland in the west, but takes a different route through the middle, using Colorado instead of Wyoming. Although presented as one continuous route, the […]

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

November 4, 2013
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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

November 1, 2013
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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

October 31, 2013
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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

October 30, 2013
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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 […]

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

October 28, 2013
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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

Historical Map: San Francisco Muni Transit Routes, 1970

October 23, 2013
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For a long period of time, the San Francisco Municipal Railway, (commonly shortened to just “Muni”) used pretty much exactly the same map in their brochures. It seems that each year, they’d simply make any amendments required – addition of new routes, deletion of old ones, etc. –  and then reprint the brochure/map in a new colour combination. The earliest example I can find, from 1952, uses a sombre two-color palette of black and red, […]

Historical Poster: London Transport Jubilee Line Opening, 1979

October 16, 2013
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Okay, here’s just one more Tube-map themed poster (for now). This one’s a little more contemporary than the others I’ve featured recently, dating from early 1979. The cheerful little Tube train – which looks like a model that’s been photographed, rather than an illustration –  is actually a pretty reasonable stand-in for the geographical layout of the new line, which then ran from Stanmore to a new Charing Cross station (later extensions mean that the […]