Posted by Seiji Tanaka on his Twitter account, here’s a fictional MBTA map at an LA Metro station for film/TV shooting. The map is at the fictional “Rockwater” station on the equally fictional Yellow Line (replacing the real world Orange Line).

We’ve covered fictional transit maps from TV shows and movies before (this weird DC Metro map from the TV show “Leverage” springs to mind), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the prop designers have just downloaded and edited the official map, which is obviously what has happened here. What’s more, it’s been edited really badly.

The blue water and white background of the official map has been removed and the whole map has been placed on a grey/beige background instead… but all the white boxes behind bus route numbers and white keylines around the route lines that were used to separate them from other elements are still in place. Which means there’s a lot of weird, random white elements on the map for no apparent reason. There are also ferry routes, but no water for them to sail across.

Most of the commuter rail routes have been removed, but not all of the stations: Yawkey is just floating in the middle of the map by itself, for example, and interchange stations still retain their extra “blob” for commuter rail platforms.

The real-life Blue line is now Purple, the Green Line is now Blue (with all sorts of branch name errors) and the Orange Line is now Yellow. This line has also had all of its station names changed, mostly to very un-Bostonian names, like “San Jacomo” and “Cabrerra”. Is this the MBTA or Grand Theft Auto? To me, this suggests that this part of the map might feature a little more prominently in whatever scenes it is featured in.

Yes, I know that these maps tend to appear fleetingly in the background of whatever show they’re used in, so it’s a little unfair to subject them to the same scrutiny as a real transit map, but this one struck me as particularly odd, seeing as it’s so directly and obviously based off the official map (it even has the crossed-out station icon for Government Center).

P.S. Anyone know what TV show/movie this prop is from?  It’s been confirmed that this is from an episode of “CSI: Cyber”.