I’m loving this totally bonkers diagram of lines owned, leased or controlled by the Boston & Maine RR in 1915. An increasingly complex system of line colours combined with dashes, dots and zig-zags attempts to record all the various agreements in place for line leases and trackage rights. The B&M itself is the yellow lines to the right of the map – all the other coloured lines are lines that they have some level of control over, and the thin black lines are competitor railroads.
Production-wise, it looks like the black parts of the map have been printed onto cloth, and all the colours have been hand-painted over the top – you can see some smudges and smears in certain locations. The map also may have been amended by hand at some point: a red hatched line from Manchester to Concord has been painted over the printed matter.
Stylistically, the piece is more diagram than map with everything straightened out as much as possible, but it’s fairly primitive work. Still, the resemblance to modern colour-coded transit maps is impossible to ignore!
I just stumbled across this unofficial vision of Sydney’s rail transit around the year 2030 or so (mainly because the discussion about it on Reddit was linking to old Sydney maps on my blog), and I have to say that I really quite like it.
The 30/60 angles actually suit the network really well, and set up some nice axes and patterns throughout the diagram. I especially like the way the Cumberland Line heads straight up to Richmond from Parramatta, and the way the Northern Line angles back up to rejoin the North Shore Line at Hornsby. It’s a pity that the M1 Metro line has to take that little realignment jog at Cherrybrook, because all the other Metro lines are so straight – the Marrickville to Bankstown section is very impressively handled. The City Circle as an actual circle works surprisingly well considering the angularity of the rest of the diagram.
The light rail lines are handled about as well as they can be at this scale: an indication that they exist and where they interchange with the suburban lines. It’s unfortunate that the walking distance interchange at Lewisham isn’t indicated, but I can see how that would cause difficulties. It’d be nice if the legend for the light rail could be incorporated with the rest of the map information down the right hand side of the diagram: it always looks a little disjointed when there are legends scattered around the map, filling up empty space.
Some slight reconfiguring and realignment could improve the map even more: I’d like to see even spacing for the station labels from Harris Park all the way down to Glenfield, instead of the way the labels tighten up from Canley Vale. There’s the opportunity for a nice horizontal axis across the map by aligning the centres of the Aerotropolis station marker with the horizontal section of the T3 through Carramar and Villawood with the Bankstown to Marrickville section of the M1 line (or perhaps the horizontal part of the T8 Airport line instead?).
Some of the labelling is a bit cramped: the Waterloo label is ambiguously placed, and the line service bullets are jammed up right underneath Lidcombe’s label with no breathing room at all, for example. Overall, the North Shore and Illawarra lines seem more cramped than the rest of the map, though this may be unavoidable on the canvas used.
The codes for regional trains (BMT, CCN, etc.) don’t mean much by themselves: I’d prefer it if full names – Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Newcastle, etc. – were used along with some key destinations listed.
Finally, care needs to be taken when designing a diagram with a dark background: the dark blue Illawarra Line has very little contrast with the background and probably needs to be lightened – possibly adjusting the T2’s cyan colour accordingly.
Our final word: A confident and accomplished diagram, that really only needs some minor tweaking and quality control to be truly excellent. It definitely caught my attention! Three-and-a-half-stars!
A great map of Denver from 1904, showing the extant lines of the Denver City Tramway Company (DCTC) in green, with planned lines in red – rapid expansion seemed to be the name of the game!
The DCTC is unusual for a couple of reasons: it used the less common 3-foot-6-inch “colonial” narrow gauge for its lines instead of standard gauge, and referred to itself as a “tramway”, a term used almost nowhere else in the United States – streetcar or trolley normally being the terms of choice. No one seems quite sure exactly why this term was employed in Denver.
Nice, the fifth most populated city in France, recently expanded its tram network to all major districts. I designed a map to help people get around more easily.
Transit Maps says:
When I visited Nice back in 2003, it didn’t even have a tramway (which meant a lot of walking for me!), so to see an extensive system like this only 17 years later is quite amazing. The system has headways as short as four minutes, and uses on-board batteries on the T1 line to cross the Place Masséna and Place Garibaldi without unsightly overhead wires.
Robert’s map is generally neat and clean, presenting a good schematic overview of the network, but there are a few elements and design decisions that I find puzzling. First is the use of a callout box to list the stops between Ferber and Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen on the T2 line… there’s nothing special or unique about these stops that I can see, so I can only surmise that Robert simply ran out of space to fit them in conventionally. I don’t find it a very satisfactory solution, and I’d love to see if Robert could come up with a way to reconfigure things so that these stops get equal treatment with all the others.
Another strange choice is the placement of the CADAM stop at the end of T2 to the east of T3. In reality, T2 takes a turn to the west here and CADAM lies on the other side of T3. I’m not sure exactly why Robert is reluctant to show the lines in their correct relative positions here: it would improve the diagram if T3 continued in a straight line without that little jog before Méridia, and there’s plenty of room for CADAM above Digue des Français.
Hyphenating names is something I always see as a last resort – the “Termi-nal” breaks at the airport stops don’t read particularly well, and I think Robert should look for ways to avoid this if possible. While we’re on the subject of the airport, I believe that the tram is free between the terminals and the Grand Arénas stop, which would be nice to show on the map, especially for visitors to Nice.
Robert has done a great job of showing the odd layout of the Grand Arénas stop, which is really three separate platforms in fairly close proximity, each serving a completely different travel direction. Perhaps this approach could also be used at the Jean Médecin and Garabaldi interchanges, which do require some walking between the separate platforms. The indication of parklands as landmarks is nice, as is Robert’s adorable little steam train to indicate mainline SNCF services – I’d probably have them all facing the same way to keep the shape of the icon consistent, however.
Our final word: A solid effort that’s definitely very readable and usable. The seemingly arbitrary callout box for some stops is my biggest worry.
Not a heavy Metro-centric map like your usual fare, these are mostly country road coaches spanning the wide south-west of Western Australia (spanning about 1,300kms from Kalbarri to Esperance). I find it interesting to look at though, especially the reliance on different dot-dash combinations for each coach. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.
Transit Maps says:
First things first – let’s get the pronunciation of this awkwardly styled name out of the way: it’s “Trans double-u ay”, short for “Transport Western Australia”, even though it really looks like it should be “Trans-wah”.
The next thing to note is the sheer scale of this map: it stretches over 685 km (425 miles) east to west, and 950 km (590 miles) north to south – and that’s still only the southwest quarter of the state of Western Australia! Interestingly, the map shows both rail services and long-distance coach services on the same map – the rail tends to run more frequently than the buses, which are often on a thrice-weekly schedule. While the train stations get a fairly traditional black dot to indicate stations, the bus stops get an odd little bullet point adjacent to the relevant route lines, which is not something I’ve ever seen before. It seems that this approach has been taken because the different line styles used for the bus route lines – solid, dashed, dotted, etc.) would make it difficult for any normal stop symbol to work effectively.
All these different line styles are implemented so that the routes can be colour coded into directional groups but it does make the map look very busy, and all the usual problems with dashes, etc. being interpreted as meaning “under construction” or “less service” come into play as well. As there’s only a few lines in each grouping, I’d have preferred to see variations in solid colours instead – tints and shades of the base colour would probably work just fine.
One big plus, however: the “Service Connection” marker really does indicate a location where you can get off a bus and transfer to another destination within a reasonable timeframe – a huge consideration when another bus might not be along for a couple of days!
Our final word: Perhaps an overly-complex solution to a pretty simple problem, but it does the job in the end. Two-and-half stars.
This spectacular diagram from the February 28, 1903 edition of the Street Railway Journal looks for all the world like a modern schematic diagram of the International Railway Company’s lines, but there’s a bit of a twist in the tale.
It’s actually a diagram of a telephonic dispatching system that the company was planning to install on its city and interurban lines, replacing a mixed telegraph/phone system. As telegraphs needed a skilled operator at every location, the benefits of a telephone – which almost any member of staff could readily use – were very apparent.
So instead of traditional stations along each line, the diagram instead shows the locations of these new-fangled telephones, spaced roughly a mile-and-a-half apart. Sometimes these were stations or car barns – but not always, as locations like “1/4 mile S. of Kenoche Road” attest.
The Buffalo city streetcars are arrayed out at the bottom of the diagram, spreading out from the company’s private telephone exchange in Buffalo and arranged in correct topological order, while the interurban lines pass through the the despatch (sic) board on their way to Niagara Falls, Lockport and other distant destinations. It can be noted that one of the telephones on the Niagara Falls dispatching circuit is located in the Men’s Room of the company’s Niagara Falls offices!
Our final word: A telephonic circuit diagram that almost perfectly mimics the modern transit diagram in form. Fascinating! Read the full article from the Street Railway Journal for full details about the telephone network, including a great passage about how orders were sent, repeated and confirmed to be accurate by all parties over a telephone line.
A superb cutaway map of the spectacular spiral tunnels on the Albula Railway in Switzerland, drawn for The Eagle magazine in 1952 by prolific artist Leslie Ashwell Wood.
Compare to similar spiral tunnels on the Gotthardbahn.
Hi Cameron! I was just browsing through your review archives and saw that the last time you covered Prague was in 2012 [A variety of maps were reviewed back then: full service, overview and “just right” Metro and tram – Cam]. Recently the transit authority PID (Pražská integrovaná doprava, Prague integrated transportation) released a map of a never before seen scale that I thought you might be interested in checking out. It’s displayed at information stands near metro station entrances and passengers can pick up free prints from the main railroad station. What’s unique about this map is that it includes absolutely all transit routes managed by PID (universal branding and a united fare system applies) within the limits of Prague: metro, trams, buses as well as commuter trains — and the main focus is on service frequency rather than vehicle type, which I find extremely useful. It also demonstrates the nature of a truly integrated transit system, which, for a transit advocate like me, is quite amazing! I was really wondering what your opinion on this map would be as I was personally super impressed by the author’s attention to detail (train tunnels are particularly lovely). Greetings from the Czech Republic… and keep up the amazing work! I always enjoy reading your reviews.
Transit Maps says:
Detailed maps like these are often hard to review, because I’m looking at a PDF on a screen instead of on a large printed sheet as intended by the designer – this map is meant to be on an A1 sheet (841 x 594mm or about 33.1 x 23.4 inches), so it’s big.
That said, my overall impression is that this is a comprehensive and detailed map of services in and around Prague, a commendable effort indeed. The three Metro lines are thick and bright and underpin the rest of the map – I like the use of the Metro’s distinctive “M-arrow” logo as station markers: it really helps further differentiate these lines from everything else. The other city services – tram, trolleybus, bus, ferry and funicular – are only differentiated by frequency, with thicker lines meaning “more often”. There’s no definition of actual frequency given in the legend, so the concept can only be taken as a general indication of how often things run. A secondary legend down the bottom right indicates what numbers each service type uses (1–26 for trams, 50–68 for trolleybuses, and three-digit numbers for buses), which is very handy to know. I also like the icons for the different transit modes!
While the map is intentionally and necessarily detailed, I do feel it can become overly fussy in a few places. For example, the map shows all the curves in the road that the tram lines take north of Malostranská Metro station – a particularly hilly part of town just below Prague Castle – but all it does is obscure the Metro line beneath it. Given a choice between showing the actual routing of lines and simplifying the design so that paths can be followed more easily, I’d prefer the latter in most cases. I’m undecided about the white areas in the background of the map to denote populated areas: I can see why it’s been done, but it makes the whole map look a bit patchy. I’d be interested to see a version where the inner PID zone is an all white background with the outer zone light grey – I think it would help to make the map look a bit less busy and draw attention to that central area bit more.
On a similar note, I think that raster effects are a bit overused throughout the map: water, parks, zone boundaries, bridges and more all use some kind of inner glow or drop shadow and it can get distracting, especially where two different glows interact with each other. I personally think the glow edges on the parks could be done away with to make the whole map a bit flatter and more graphical.
Our final word: An impressive attempt at a unified transit map for greater Prague. Perhaps a little too busy and fussy in parts, but could be great if it was simplified and streamlined a bit. Three-and-a-half stars!
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 the street having changed.
Of interest is the way that the cartographer has made the map simpler (and easier to draw!) by only including streets within a few blocks of each line – in effect illustrating the walksheds or catchment area for this form of transit. Also, that’s a splendid north pointer at the bottom left!
Our final word: Rough around the edges, but simple and effective.
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 the legend were also used on the headboards of the trams themselves, and generally indicated which termini the trams ran between – an aid to illiterate riders.
See also: this roughly contemporaneous diagram of the lines on a ticket (July 2013, 5 stars).
