As you’d expect from the acclaimed master of ski resort maps, the mountains in this map are gorgeously rendered, and Amtrak’s routes are drawn as straight red lines — almost as if they were ski lifts across the country. I particularly like it when a route line “disappears” behind a particularly tall mountain — it’s something that really sells the implied dimensionality of the map.
It is perhaps unfortunate that some routes have been omitted from the map — none of the Michigan Services make it, nor the City of New Orleans, which is almost unforgivable. Perhaps it’s better to treat this as a work of art than a practical map?
On a personal note, I’m just happy to say that I’ve now been published in the same magazine as James Niehues — my Amtrak as Subway Map was the very first in this series of alternate Amtrak maps appearing in The National, way back in December 2016/January 2017.
If, like me, you’re a fan of James Niehues’ work, you might want to check out this book about his career, The Man Behind the Maps (affiliate link).
This confection of a map appears on SNCF’s website for their low-cost, no-frills, everything-costs-extra TGV service, Ouigo (a name that makes a pun in both English and French — “we go” in the former and “yes, go” in the latter).
The map is certainly bright and cheerful, and very definitely on brand for the service. It uses the bright magenta and sky blue colours from the train livery liberally and presents all of France as a theme park (complete with “roller coaster” track!) called “Ouigoland” — tying in perfectly with the service’s tagline of “Let’s play!”
The major destinations get little illustrative icons to depict the region, ranging from a lovely little Hotel Negresco in Nice to a paper cone of anthropomorphic frites (!) in Lille. The elephant for Nantes confused me at first, but there is actually an enormous mechanical pachyderm — Le Grand Élephant — in that city. You can take rides in it! The starfish sunning itself on a towel is probably my favourite.
While I love the style of the map, it’s really just used to highlight potential destinations, rather than giving any indication of the actual network. This is probably intentional, as the cut-price nature of Ouigo echoes that of no-frills airlines: the destination is the thing, not the journey or route taken to get there. You’re really meant to go to the Ouigo website, enter your starting and ending locations and see how cheap the fares are, basically.
Our final word: Adorable and well-executed, if not actually useful to gain a full understanding of the ins-and-outs of the rapidly expanding Ouigo network. Hmmm, maybe a project for the future? Three stars.
Thanks to everyone who has alerted me to this rather wonderful map of the German Intercity rail network, created by a Reddit user known only as “theflyingindonesian”. This is actually something that I thought about tackling after I finished my French TGV network map way back in 2011, so I know how daunting and complex a project this is!
If you’ve never seen the official Deutsche Bahn diagrams for these networks, prepare to be very disappointed. They’re incredibly average pieces of work, with awful “RGB-bright” colours and arcane combinations of dotted and dashed lines to indicate service frequency. They’re also split up into two separate maps — one for EC/IC services, and another for ICE — probably because it would be impossible to work anything out at all if the two maps were combined. I reproduce the EC/IC map here, just so you can see how average it truly is. So right from the start, this new map is a major upgrade.
I particularly like the dead straight trajectory of the lines from Hamburg down to Fulda, and the clear treatment of the potentially difficult and convoluted Rhine-Ruhr area. I also like the way that the routes for trains that pass through major stations get a ghosted-back line to link the routes across the (sometimes very large) station rectangles.
On a map this complex, some labels are going to have to sit across route lines, but I think it’s generally been handled well and everything seems very legible. The route designation lozenges are distributed evenly across the map, and I generally don’t have any problem following a route from end-to-end. I’m not entirely sure about the usefulness of including a “selection” of RE routes: they make the map a bit busier than it needs to be, although perhaps it does help to indicate some gaps in the high-speed rail network.
The colours used for the routes are interesting: they mostly seem to be nicer, less bright versions of the ones on the official map. Which is fine, I guess, but I’d be interested to see a version where colour conveys more meaning. I’m pretty certain that the colours on the official maps are arbitrarily assigned for the sole purpose of keeping similar colours as far apart as possible, so with a little thought a more meaningful purpose could be assigned. Perhaps a trunk-based system like the New York Subway where lines that run along a major corridor get assigned like or similar colours could be employed?
A note: it would appear that many of the apparent typographical errors in the map are actually intentional and meant as some type of in-joke by the author. Make of that what you will!
Our final word: Infinitely superior to DB’s official maps, and quite glorious to look at. 4.5 stars!
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A rather wonderful little map from the 1929 edition of the Wanamaker’s Diary, showing how accessible the store – generally regarded as one of the first department stores in the United States – was by public transportation. I particularly like how all the modes are clearly defined by delightful little profile illustrations – adorable little motor coaches, single cars with trolley poles for streetcars and multiple cars for the subway and elevated lines. The sheer proliferation of multiple streetcar routes to the west of the map is something to behold.
Along with a major service revision in December 2019 that – amongst other things –closed the Almaden Shuttle light rail line, San Jose’s Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) also took the opportunity to introduce a new light rail map, shown here.
While it’s nothing outstanding, it’s clean, clear and easy to understand – which actually puts it ahead of quite a lot of other maps out there. I would like to see another use of the big curve on the Orange Line between Alder and Cropley somewhere else on the map: it just looks a little odd being the only instance on the map. As riders on the Orange Line are required to transfer to get downtown on the Blue or Green lines, it could be helpful for the map to indicate preferred transfer stations to make that as seamless as possible. Is Old Ironsides better, or is Champion? Or one of the others?
Best practices would also ask for the “O”, “G” and “B” bullets to be repeated at the ends of their respective lines to aid colour-blind users, and listing each line’s terminus stations in the legend would also be helpful. Speaking of the legend, I don’t see a single instance of the bike lockers icon on the actual map – oops!
Our final word: The previous VTA light rail map had a lovely little tilt to the left which mirrored the real world alignment of the lines from downtown up to Tasman, which I do miss on this new version. However, this one is cleaner and simpler, so I think it’s an improvement overall. 3 stars.
Here’s a very handsome little map showing the lines of the Eastern Massachusetts Street Railway from sometime in the late 1930s. By this point in time however, almost all of the routes were run by buses, making the name of the company somewhat ironic. Just two streetcar lines remain: Fields Corner to Quincy (with branches from there to Quincy Point or Houghs Neck), and Sullivan Square to Stoneham.
The map itself is drawn in a lovely, ornate illustrative style that was very popular at the time with scrollwork around the map’s legend, a decorative border and a beautiful compass rose. The use of blue for both water and terrain is rather clever — the differing textures used allows the two to be told apart easily and also makes the black route lines and text stand out from the background better.
This particular copy of the map has had some additions penciled in by an unknown hand — a whole new line from Taunton to Norton, and some directional arrows along routes on the right half of the map, almost as if someone was planning a journey to take advantage of the $1 Ride-all-Day far advertised in the copy below the map.
A map from on what looks like a presentation board showing the mid-1970s version of the Chicago Central Area Transit Plan. Initially planned as a whole new system of subway lines to entirely replace the Loop in downtown Chicago in the late 1960s, rising costs caused the program to be split into parts: the “Core Plan” seen here, with the balance to be built later. As it happened, none of it was ever actually constructed.
The three components of the “Core Plan” — the Franklin Street Subway (red), the Monroe Street Distributor (blue) and a small linking section of the Randolph Line (green) — were chosen because they could be built with a minimum of disruption and provided the best integration with the existing system.
The map itself has a nice clean architectural feeling to it, perfectly suited to the presentation format it was intended for. One odd bit of 1970s styling is the use of lower case for the extant line names — “dan ryan”, “douglas”, etc.
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I absolutely love this almost abstract representation of the Gotthardbahn from a Swiss advertising brochure from 1957. Just major cities, the distinctive loops and spirals of the line (described in detail in this post from 2014) and the famous 15-kilometre-long Gotthard Tunnel shown illustratively cutting through a massive mountain.
Transit maps for Naples have been decidedly average and piecemeal in the past (see here and here for past reviews), so it’s lovely to see this new official map presenting a fully integrated view of rapid transit in and around the city.
Designed by Andrea Spinosa of CityRailways — whose Atlas of Italian Rail Transit poster we reviewed back in 2014 — this is definitely a huge step in the right direction, being much better designed and clearer to read than previous efforts. The map also finally makes official a unified line numbering system that was first proposed in 1997, and groups the suburban rail services together by colours — the Circumvesuviano lines are all tones of red, for example. The city’s funicular railways are designated by letters (A, B, C and D) to set them apart from the numbered rail lines. There’s also good differentiation between the different modes of interchange: direct interchanges, “out of station” interchanges and even via city escalator. Best of all, it seems to be future-proofed, with under-construction lines clearly laid out as an integral part of the design.
The final word: Sooooooo much better than anything Naples has had before, and really quite lovely. Four stars!
A design hinted at by Jug Cerovic after last year’s Transit Mapping Symposium, and seen in a photograph earlier this year has finally been made official. Here’s the new Singapore MRT map, currently only installed at the new Thomson-East Coast Line stations (Woodlands North, Woodlands and Woodlands South) but planned to be rolled out to the entire network. Of note is that the process for this redesign began way back in 2015 with a lot of public engagement and testing of prototypes — new transit maps don’t just happen overnight!
The first thing to notice is that the Circle Line is now actually a circle, which works fairly well for the most part: the stations along its arc are spaced out relatively evenly, and it seems to create a bit more space for the busier central part of the map. This allows a rudimentary representation of the Singapore River and Marina Bay to be added, along with little icons of sights in the vicinity. It’s a nice usability touch to help tourists orient themselves on an otherwise fairly featureless map. The prototype seen in the earlier photo showed the Botanic Gardens as a lonely green “parkland” area, but that seems to have been deleted for the final version.
Also interesting is that Singapore is now properly presented as an island, though a pretty roughly-drawn, blobby one that I don’t find particularly attractive. In reality, the eastern part of the green East-West Line out to Pasir Ris and Changi Airport shadows the coastline pretty closely the whole way: the map makes it look like there’s a giant empty “transit desert” in the island’s south-east quadrant! The addition of Sentosa Island and the connections from HarbourFront station are very welcome, however. Jurong Island doesn’t seem to rate, though… it can hang out with Tasmania and New Zealand as islands that get left off maps.
The presentation of the new Thomson-East Coast Line is perhaps problematic… it’s basically shown as if it was complete, without the usual dashed/faded/hollow line to indicate future sections under construction. Instead, all the stations that have yet to be opened have a brown “U/C” — for “Under Construction” — appended to their label. However, this code isn’t explained anywhere in the legend, which doesn’t seem very helpful to me. I wonder whether the maps are going to be updated by simply placing white stickers over the “U/C” labels as new stations come on-line?
Other quick notes: Line numbering seems to be de-emphasized in favour of line names and destinations now, with the numbered bullets at the termini much smaller when compared to previous maps. The numbered station “caplets” (to use official LTA terminology) are probably the best executed example of this style in the world: clear but distinctively designed, and able to handle multi-line interchange stations with aplomb. Addition of the future Jurong Region line looks like it’s going to be problematic within this framework.
The final word: A considered evolution of the existing house style, and one that’s definitely growing on me. I wish the island itself had a slightly more refined shape, but you can’t have everything. Three-and-a-half stars.
