All posts filed under: Historical Maps

Historical Map – Vancouver City and Suburban Lines, 1923

July 24, 2020
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A charmingly simple two-colour map of streetcar and interurban lines operated by the British Columbia Electric Railway Co. in 1923. Almost everything is hand-drawn and lettered apart from the map’s title, some explanatory text and some line numbers along the streets with more services (13-14-15-16 along Broadway West, for example). This last makes me wonder if this information was added to this edition of the map, either having been previously omitted or the lines servicing […]

Historical Map: Tramways of Constantinople, Turkey, c. 1920s

July 23, 2020
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A simple little diagram of the tram lines of the Société des Tramways de Constantinople, sometime in the 1920s (probably between 1923 and 1928, when trams began running on the Asian side of the city). While it’s a little hard to see because of the clumsy shading applied, the map is actually a decent trackage diagram – showing where the network is double-tracked or has terminus loops. The colour combinations for each line shown in […]

Submission – Historical Map, Vienna Rapid Transit Diagram, 1981 (Digital Recreation by Patrick Cipot)

June 28, 2020
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Submitted by Patrick, who says: This is Vienna’s Rapid Transit Diagram (Schnellverbindungsplan – literally “Quick Connections Map”) from September 1981. I found it hanging in a museum train a few years ago and decided to recreate/digitalize it in March of this year. The diagram should be one of the first renditions in this style, as the U2 was only opened in 1980 which made the previous style obsolete – it is in fact likely the […]

Historical Maps: Singapore MRT Map and Diagram, c. 2000

June 27, 2020
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A fascinating map and diagram of the Singapore MRT from the period c. 2000 (after the opening of the Bukit Panjang LRT in 1999, but before the change to a different mapping style in 2001). Both show the original method of using paired colours for each direction of travel along a route – an unconventional but memorable method of wayfinding. Take the Green line to head towards Pasir Ris, but the Blue Line to go […]

Historical Map: Washington Motor Coach Routes, 1923

June 24, 2020
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Here’s a delightful hand drawn and lettered map showing the burgeoning network of motor coach routes in Washington state in 1923. It would seem to have been produced as an accompaniment to an application for an additional route crossing the Cascades – shown as a yellow dashed line on the map – joining two previously unconnected segments of service. Of note is the extensive service into the Olympic Peninsula by means of a joint thru-service […]

Historical Map: Suburban Rail Map of Adelaide, South Australia, 1985

June 10, 2020
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A solid mid-1980s map of Adelaide’s surprisingly extensive suburban rail network – though there’s less branch lines than seen on this 1978 map, and many of the ones shown here would disappear in the next few years, no longer seen as profitable. The fact that all rail services are numbered allows short-turn and branch services to be easily discerned – on the green line, the 82 goes from Adelaide Station to Belair, while the 83 […]

Historical Unofficial Map: New York Subway Diagram by Synthez Design Company, 1988

May 19, 2020
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Has New York ever been so wide? This intriguing diagram from the New York Transit Museum’s collection makes the most of its landscape dimensions (possibly two pages in a guide book?) by going sideways as much as possible. Manhattan is impossibly broad, and the Bronx is shown as almost entirely to the east of it. Similar distortions happen just about everywhere, and yet – perhaps a little surprisingly – I still find the overall effect […]

Historical Map: Pullman, Washington, 1911 – The Palouse Country

May 11, 2020
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This handsome birds-eye view map of eastern Washington State comes from the Pullman Primer, a prospectus put together by the Pullman Chamber of Commerce in 1911 to attract business to the city. It shows the city nestled in the foreground, surrounded by the fertile lands of the Palouse, with Seattle and Portland in the far distance. All across the plains stretch the lines of the many and varied railroad companies of the day, connecting Pullman […]

Tips on Researching and Mapping Historical Rail Lines Using the Internet

May 3, 2020
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In between writing this blog, designing my own maps, and digitally restoring vintage maps, I also like to map out old, forgotten streetcar and electric interurban networks in Google Maps. I mainly do it because I want to compile information from various sources into one place and build my own coherent understanding of the networks that once existed. So far, I’ve done the streetcars and interurbans of Portland, Oregon in 1920; the interurbans of Spokane, […]

Historical Map: Metropolitan Railway Plan for Stockholm, 1965

March 25, 2020
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Here’s a great mid-20th Century planning map showing proposed extensions to the Stockholm Metro in 1965. The blue lines show what was already built (or about to be built) at the time, while the different types of green lines show proposed additions at varying levels of planning: solid for planned, dashed for an extension without a full alignment study, and dotted for unstudied alternative extensions. It’s definitely interesting to compare this map to what has […]