This looks like it may be affixed to a door or wall of an old train carriage (see the window just above the placard), which means the type on the rail map is incredibly small. The naming of the main railway station as “Public Square” rather than “Tower City” means this map is pre-1991 (when the station changed names), although the general aesthetics and typography would lead me to suspect that this map is from […]
transportationnation: From Oaklandish: an ambitious 1956 BART prototype map. Some might say a little overly ambitious!
Here’s a gorgeous pre-CTA planning map from Chicago in 1945, outlining all sorts of grandiose ideas for expansion of the subway system, almost none of which have actually come to pass. There appears to be a proposed second Loop, which would have run more east-west than the existing one. There’s also a planned subway line heading out to the northwest, but this doesn’t follow the same alignment as the Blue Line, and a subway line […]
This is not a map of Tokyo’s subway system, but main line trains. The subway lines are the blue crossed lines contained mostly within the circle of routes at the center right of the map. Just 14 years after World War II’s conclusion, the sheer amount of tracks in just the Tokyo/Yokohama area is astounding. Not the greatest cartography ever, however: the map is a bit of a mess. Source: Rob Ketcherside/Flickr
Not a transit diagram for public use, but a track layout of the system for operational planning. The original post on Flickr dates it between 1929-1934, based on visible names. Source: Forest Pines/Flickr
While not strictly speaking a transit map, this awesome cutaway diagram of the Hudson River Tubes featured in our last post is just too cool not to share with you. Contemporaneous with that map, this cutaway shows the junction to the northern (or Uptown) cross-Hudson tubes which leave the image to the right. Of particular interest is how the lines stack and twist around each other, almost certainly done to minimise the width of any […]
Basically an advertisement for the newly-opened Hudson River Tubes — still in use by PATH trains today, over 100 years later — with the H&M lines proudly and boldly displayed in red. Planning for the future is also on display, making the service look somewhat bigger than it really was. From my limited research, it seems that the extensions shown in Manhattan were never actually built. The Hudson Terminal Buildings (shown in the photo inset […]
Here’s a fascinating reworking of Harry Beck’s original 1933 Tube map that I haven’t seen before. Apparently it’s from an article in a journal from November 1933 that details the work required to upgrade the electrical services on the Underground. Apart from the stark black and white treatment and addition of the power stations and substations, what’s really interesting about this map are the little tweaks and changes that have already occurred since the first […]
A fantastic old in-car map from London’s old Metropolitan Railway: the world’s first underground railway and the precursor to the modern London Underground. Today, former Metropolitan Railway tracks and stations are used by the London Underground’s Metropolitan, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City, Piccadilly and Jubilee lines. I’m guessing this map is from around 1930 or so, as the Railway’s lines are substantially complete apart from the Stanmore extension out of Wembley Park, which opened in […]
Here’s another interesting planning map from Sydney, Australia, showing a vision for the future that never quite got there. If you look to the far centre right of the map, you can see the planned Eastern Suburbs line… including a never-built extension from the (now current) end of the line at Bondi Junction to Kingsford. There’s also an extra station at Woollahra in the section that did finally get built. It’s these details that allow […]
