I came across this lovely piece this morning on Twitter, so here’s a review. This is Andy’s second stab at Edinburgh (see also this map showing an “idealised” 1940s network), and I think it’s clear to see that Andy has come along in leaps and bounds as a map designer since then. One thing I always appreciate about Andy’s maps is how tactile they seem: they really do look like old printed maps and that’s […]
Milwaukee dreaming big in the last days of rail-based mass transit in that city. I can’t find many specifics about this plan, though I do know that the City was attempting to purchase the transit lines in Milwaukee from its private operators at the time, so this study may have something to do with that. On this map, the thin black lines represent local services, probably a mix of diesel bus, “trackless trolley” and streetcar […]
A scanned slide showing a section of a wall-mounted Tokyo Metro map at a station (possibly Tokyo, judging by the dirty finger marks concentrated there). The lines of the Tokyo Metro are rendered in thick, bold colours that match pretty well with the current designations – yellow/gold for the Ginza Line, red for the Marunouchi Line, and grey/silver for the Hibiya Line. The competing Toei Subway’s Asakusa Line is not rendered in its modern pink/rose colour, […]
Long before the current idea of putting Teslas in tunnels and calling it rapid transit, there was PRT, or Personal Rapid Transit. The idea was that many small carriages on guideways could take people directly to their intended destination anywhere along the route – described as a “horizontal elevator” by John Volpe, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation at the time. In the early 1970s, Denver beat out 29 other cities around the U.S. and was […]
On from the “what could have been?” files – a proposed double-decker trolleybus service covering 76 kilometres (just under 50 miles) of routes in West Yorkshire. Between 1980 and 1990, the West Yorkshire Passenger Transport Executive repeatedly attempted to gain government funding for this project: this leaflet looks like one of those efforts, extolling the benefits of such a network. Eventually, a private bus operator announced a plan to operate a diesel bus service along […]
A great photograph of what looks like a wall-mounted map showing subway service in Philadelphia dated June 1968, with particular emphasis on the Market-Frankford Line. The map is interesting for quite a few reasons, not the least of which is that it would be one of the last maps of the Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) era, as the PTC would be acquired by its successor, SEPTA, in September 1968, just a few months later. The […]
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 […]
A great map of Denver from 1904, showing the extant lines of the Denver City Tramway Company (DCTC) in green, with planned lines in red – rapid expansion seemed to be the name of the game! The DCTC is unusual for a couple of reasons: it used the less common 3-foot-6-inch “colonial” narrow gauge for its lines instead of standard gauge, and referred to itself as a “tramway”, a term used almost nowhere else in […]
This spectacular diagram from the February 28, 1903 edition of the Street Railway Journal looks for all the world like a modern schematic diagram of the International Railway Company’s lines, but there’s a bit of a twist in the tale. It’s actually a diagram of a telephonic dispatching system that the company was planning to install on its city and interurban lines, replacing a mixed telegraph/phone system. As telegraphs needed a skilled operator at every […]
A superb cutaway map of the spectacular spiral tunnels on the Albula Railway in Switzerland, drawn for The Eagle magazine in 1952 by prolific artist Leslie Ashwell Wood. Compare to similar spiral tunnels on the Gotthardbahn. Source: ausdew/Flickr
