Submitted by James, who says:
Hi Cam, love your site! I’ve been studying future railways of Southeast Asia, in particular the Kunming to Singapore line via Laos, which will begin construction in December. I’ve created a map of every proposed railway in Southeast Asia:
The details of all the proposed lines can be found on my Nomadic Notes website.
Transit Maps says:
This is obviously a labour of love from James, and it shows. Lots of great, in-depth research combined with local knowledge, and just a little bit of fantasy and wish-fulfilment as well. James notes that he’s included one particular line because he’d like to be able to get to the beach from Saigon on a pleasant weekend, for example.
The map itself is certainly interesting to look at, if just perhaps a little too reliant on the familiar trappings of the London Tube map (interchange markers, station ticks, terminal bars, etc.). James’ decision to retain the proper shapes of each country helps readers to relate the map to the real world, but it also makes the usable parts of the map rather small – there’s a lot of ocean in this part of the world! I think some expansion of the “mainland” area of the map to the top left at the expense of some of the empty expanses of water could have been achieved fairly easily and made the map a little less cramped overall.
On a map like this with a lot of routes, the number of colours used is an interesting decision to make. I feel that a smaller palette repeated across the map in different areas works better than trying to come up with 40 to 50 ever-so-slightly different colours. James has generally done a good job here, although there are a couple of places where very similar colours end up running next to each other: along the northern coast of Vietnam, for example.
As an Australian, I do have to protest at the use of the name “Indian Pacific” for one of the lines: we were there first, and by a considerable margin!
Source: Nomadic Notes – click through to read James’ comprehensive notes, really interesting stuff!