Thanks to Oliver O’Brien and CityMetric for finding this new Tube map that highlights the new Elizabeth Line (the line formerly known as “Crossrail”) route across London.

(Side note: I think I’ll call this line the “CrossLiz” from now on, as – let’s be honest – the Queen always looks a tiny bit cranky these days.)

First off, let’s examine the CrossLiz itself. Placing an entirely new line right through the centre of an already crowded map is no easy feat, but I feel like it could have been handled a little better. I know from my own comprehensive reworking of the Tube Map earlier this year that it’s entirely possible to maintain a straight trajectory for the line from Bond Street all the way past Whitechapel, so it’s a little disappointing to see the this map introduce a couple of extra kinks. If we can’t keep the Central Line dead straight anymore (one of Beck’s major compositional axes), let’s at least try to do it with the new flagship line!

The decision to show the western extent of the CrossLiz all the way out to Reading is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it plays hard and loose with geography – Reading is a looooong way west of London, and flipping the line down along the edge of the map to shoehorn it into the page constraints is taking things a little far, even for a diagrammatic map like this. Seriously, it makes the ride from Hayes & Harlington down to Heathrow (around 4.5 miles) look longer than the trip from there out to Reading (25 miles). Beck knew what to do with far-flung reaches of the network: put the station names into a box that points off the edge of the page and be done with things!

The inclusion of Reading also makes the map wider than it was previously, so the legend has had to be moved from a column off to the right of the map to the empty southwestern portion of the map. I’m actually in favour of this: it looks more integrated and fits the space very neatly.

There are other concerns with the depiction of the CrossLiz as well. Acton Main Line is in completely the wrong place – it should be south of the Central Line, between West Acton and North Acton, not way up there. The way that the line is shown as crossing under the Thames to cut across the Greenwich peninsula and back under the Thames again is just lazy: the tunnel stays entirely to the north of the river through this section. The Woolwich station should interact with the Woolwich Arsenal DLR station: they’re very close to each other and will almost certainly operate as an Out of Station Interchange (OSI) pair.

In addition to the CrossLiz, I’m also interested in what else this map – clearly marked as a DRAFT “based on January 2016 specifications” – can tell us about the future of the Tube Map. Although all the other lines are greyed out to place the emphasis on the new route, I can still see quite a few differences when compared to the current edition.

First: this map has no zones. And I don’t just mean that they’ve been deleted – the map has been extensively reworked to remove all trace of them. An obvious example of this is along the Piccadilly line out to Heathrow: all the station ticks are now evenly spaced out without the awkward gaps that were needed to make labels fit entirely within a shaded zone area. The southern part of the Northern line to Morden similarly benefits from this, with all station labels now on the same side of the route line. This is a lot of work to undertake just for a quick “look at our new line” map, so it makes me wonder… are zones on the official map on their way out?

The area around Paddington has been hugely reworked to accommodate the CrossLiz, but still gets the arrangement of platforms wrong. The Bakerloo is shown as interfacing directly with the Circle/Hammersmith & City lines, when it should be paired with the District/Circle lines at the Praed Street part of the complex. The other thing that this new configuration does is to place the Bakerloo’s Edgware Road station to the south of its Circle/H&C counterpart, which is just weird. Marylebone has to go along for the ride, so it’s in the wrong place, too.

Lots of errors from previous editions remain: South Kensington’s dumbbell sits too low on the District/Circle line; South Tottenham is in the wrong place relative to Seven Sisters, as is the Overground’s Bethnal Green when compared to its Central line counterpart; the ugly cramped curves for the District line into and out of Earl’s Court are still there… and a multitude of other little things too tedious to list here.

tl;dr: CrossLiz integration into map not great, zones strangely absent, Paddington still a complete mess despite extensive reworking, lots of annoying errors and misplaced stations.

Source: Easiest to find on the Crossrail project website