Project: Streetcars and Electric Railways in Portland, 1920

July 31, 2016
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It’s safe to say that I’m fascinated with the rich transit history of my adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, and it’s certainly something that I’ve explored before in a previous project. This new project started out with a very simple goal – to produce a route map of Portland streetcars at their zenith in 1920 that showed each line separately – but it quickly grew into something much more.

As I worked on my initial map, it quickly became apparent to me that information about the streetcars back then was imprecise, fractured and difficult to find. Books like John Labbe’s Fares, Please! Those Portland Trolley Years and Richard Thompson’s series of books about the history of Portland’s streetcars helped to fill in a lot of the gaps, but they were designed more as historical and photographic records than a technical summary of routings. Information found on the internet was often incomplete, like this list of streetcar lines. For someone trying to piece together how the downtown trolley loops worked, it was a very frustrating time, with lots of cross-referencing required.

So while I did complete a designed map of the lines (as shown here), I also started compiling my findings into an interactive Google Map, accurately plotting each line as it existed in 1920, paying attention to where each line used a private right-of-way, and noting that the streetcars would have used the old Morrison Bridge, which actually connected to Morrison Street on the west side.  I added notes on where track, evidence of rights-of-way and other infrastructure related to the system could still be found today, as well as historical photos and notes for things long gone.

Once I finished plotting the streetcar network, I expanded the scope of the map to include all electric passenger rail out of Portland in 1920: trolleys to Troutdale, Oregon City, Bull Run and Cazadero; and interurban electric trains running down the Willamette Valley as far as Corvallis, Albany and Eugene. This year was the absolute peak of electrical rail traction; by the end of the decade both the streetcars and the interurbans would already be in serious decline.

Multiple sources were used to compile this part of the map, including historical USGS topographical maps of Oregon, numerous maps and pages from the internet, and even Google Maps itself. I found that if you zoom in close enough, Google shows tax lots, which often still include the otherwise-invisible right-of-way of long-abandoned rail lines.

Some of the old lines still exist much as they did back in 1920,  while others have been repurposed as modern passenger rail – TriMet’s MAX Blue Line runs on old electric railway alignments on both the west and east sides, as does the WES commuter rail. The old Springwater and Cazadero Divisions now form a walking trail that can take you from inner Portland almost out to Estacada. However, some lines have long since been abandoned, with only those tax lot boundaries or a road that was laid down directly over the old tracks to tell you of its previous existence.

After all that work, I’m proud to announce that the map can be viewed below, or you can click here to view it full-screen.

It’s still very much a work in progress – I’ll add any corrections to it as I find them, and will continue to add historical information and photographs to the map as well – but I’m already very happy that I’ve created something that consolidates so many different and varied informational sources into one place. I’m certainly going to find it useful going forward, and I hope others will as well. I’d love to hear your thoughts about the map in the comments below!

New Project/Work-in-Progress – Historical Map: Streetcar Lines of Portland, Oregon, 1920

July 23, 2016
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Despite Portland once having one of the largest streetcar networks in the United States, finding reliable, empirical information about it is surprisingly difficult. Books about the history of the streetcar – like Richard Thompson’s series of books or John Labbe’s Fares Please! – tend to be more photographs and captions than exhaustive detail, internet sources are incomplete and at times contradictory, and even contemporaneous sources are frustratingly incorrect. A much-referenced Pittmon map of streetcar lines was not updated at all from c.1913 to the late 1920s, but was just republished year after year with references to long-closed or merged routes. 

However, by combining all of these sources, I think I’ve managed to produce a mostly accurate map of streetcar lines in Portland in 1920 – the year the system reached its maximum extent with the addition of the City’s Municipal Terminal Line in St. Johns. 

I say mostly accurate, because I’m almost certain that some of my downtown routing is wrong: working out all the loops and terminus locations is a thankless task. My next step is going to be to create individual line maps for each route, which will hopefully help refine and correct this map. After that, a modern styled transit map of the network is on the cards, and even a chronological series of maps is a possibility.

At this time, there were a staggering 38 streetcar lines running in the city of Portland. Most were run by the Portland Railway, Light and Power Company (or PRL&P, a direct predecessor to today’s PGE), though a few lines were operated by other companies – the Kenton Traction Company’s stockyard line, the City-run Municipal Terminal line, and the free-to-ride Errol Heights stub line, owned by the eponymous Errol Heights Railway Company. In addition to this were some connecting streetcar lines at the city limits, interurban electric trains that could take you as far afield as McMinnville, Salem, Eugene and Corvallis, and mainline steam trains connecting to the rest of the country.

This map is really just my preliminary working map, but it looks pretty nifty, so I thought I’d share. The blue colour used for route lines is set to multiply, so the darker the blue, the more routes are running along a section. The downtown Alder loop out over the Hawthorne Bridge was certainly busy! I’ve substituted a grey for blue for short stub lines and crosstown lines – those that either run only on the east side like the Bridge Transfer (BT) and Russell–Shaver (RS) lines, or that run through the city like the North and South (NS) Portland line. Most of the letter designations were in use at the time on the streetcars themselves, although I’ve had to invent my own in a couple of cases to make the map consistent. The Richmond (RM) and Woodstock (WS) lines were sometimes referred to as Waverley–Richmond (WR) and Waverley–Woodstock (WW), but my usage seems to be correct for 1920 from what I’ve seen.

If you have any thought or corrections, use the contact form on the site. If you want to correspond, please don’t use the “Anonymous” feature so that I can get your email address.

UPDATE 7/25: First round of corrections to the map! Fixed the downtown routing of the Alberta line, which I’d erroneously placed on 5th and 3rd instead of 3rd and 2nd. Reversed the jog at the eastern end of the Beaumont line to properly indicate that the line moves westward from E. 42nd to E. 41st as it reaches The Alameda. All references to the Vancouver line now correctly use “VC” as the abbreviation – thanks to those who pointed this mistake out! 

Finally, after a lot of research, I’ve downgraded the United Railways line that ran through NW Portland to the city limits to an electric interurban instead of a streetcar. The line originally ran from the North Bank Depot in Portland (the buildings of which still remain today as fancy condos) all the way to Wilkesboro and Banks via Linnton and the Cornelius Pass. In 1914, United Railways requested that the fare for the trip from Portland to Linnton be increased from 5 cents to 10 cents. The Oregon Commission granted the increase, but the Multnomah County Court then determined that such an increase was in breach of the terms of the franchise, which specified 5 cents as the maximum fare. As punishment, United Railways was ordered to tear up their track from the Portland city boundary all the way to Linnton, leaving two disconnected sections of the line: Banks to Linnton, and the short remaining line within Portland itself, as shown on this map. Passengers were now forced to use a Spokane, Portland and Seattle (SP&S) steam train to make a connection between the two sections. Unsurprisingly, ridership dropped drastically and electric service on the Banks section of the line ceased in 1923. A fascinating slice of railroad history!

UPDATE 7/28: A few more little edits. Added the route disc for the 13th Street line. Redrew the Mississippi Avenue line to more accurately show the jog between Mississippi and Albina north of Skidmore. Redrew the end of the Errol Heights line to reflect the actual trajectory of Andover (now Flavel). Added the loop at the end of The Oaks line to show how those trains returned to downtown. The Mount Hood Railway is now correctly shown as an electric line, not a steam line. Added railway ownership notes to all the lines leaving the map.

Submission – Official Map: Whippet Buses, Cambridgeshire, England

July 15, 2016
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Submitted by Tim C, who says:

Here’s the route map of Whippet, Cambridgeshire’s “other” bus company. Frankly their route map is a far better effort than Stagecoaches! Brilliantly, their small buses are called Whippet Puppy, and when out of service their matrix displays say “Woof!” which is just fantastic.

Transit Maps says:

There’s a definite aesthetic appeal to this map, with an intelligent use of 30-degree angles and a nice hierarchy between the coloured (main) routes and the grey (local) ones. I have a feeling that perhaps the map isn’t quite detailed enough to fully convey all the nuances of the routes within each populated area, but if you want to get from town to town, it definitely does the job. 

There are a few problems, notably in the middle of the map near Boxworth, where the 2, 8 and 9 exit the roundabout in every direction, making the actual routing difficult to follow.

The map is also notable for showing the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, the longest such road in the world at 16 miles (25 km) in length. It runs along the former path of the Cambridge and Huntingdon railway and operates routes run by both Whippet (Route C) and Stagecoach (Routes A and B; not shown on this map). There appears to be an error with the way that the southern section of the busway is shown on the map: it has the ticking, but not the cased lines.

The legend is nicely comprehensive, but I wonder if it could be improved further by grouping the routes by the days of the week that they run, then by route number (all the daily routes, all the Monday–Saturday routes, all the Monday–Friday routes, etc.)

Our rating: Looks lovely and works well for town-to-town trips (which I suspect is its major purpose), but perhaps a little light on detail for use within each town. 3 stars.

Submission – Official Map: Multimodal Transit Map for Utrecht, The Netherlands by Jug Cerovic

July 15, 2016
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Submitted by the author, who says:

Dear Cameron,

You’ll be happy to hear that my Luxembourg map is having a beneficial influence on the neighbouring communities. U-OV, the company operating buses and trams in Utrecht, Netherlands, recently commissioned me to build a new map for Utrecht based on the previous Luxembourg experience.

This gave me the opportunity to explore all concepts further and since this week the new map is official and live 🙂

Here are the main features:

  • The city center where distances are on a walking scale and the De Uuithof University area are represented geographically whereas the periphery is schematized but topologically accurate.
  • Line frequency is shown on a simple binary mode: thick line = high frequency / thin line = low frequency
  • In order to make the complex bus network understandable I have split it into 5 sub-networks with one color assigned to each namely:
     – Lines that go through the center (Purple)
     – Lines that terminate at Utrecht Central Station (Green)
     – Lines serving De Uithof University center in the East (Orange)
     – Tangent lines (Brown)
     – Local lines (Pink)
  • Train lines are blue, and tram lines are yellow
  • All angles are multiples of 30°, this corresponds closely to the urban layout
  • Some nice landmarks help orientation

You can see the map and design notes on my website here, and on the official U-OV website here. I’m really happy with the result, the map has a unique character and gives an intuitive feel of the city and its layout.

Transit Maps says:

Looks like Jug’s mission to improve the transit maps of Europe (and beyond!) one-by-one is continuing! This is another lovely piece of design, and is an obvious stylistic extension of his previous sterling work on the Luxembourg bus map (June 2015 for his initial version, March 2016 for the official version).

Like that map, the historical centre is rendered fairly faithfully here, while the outlying areas are rendered more schematically. The extra complexity and size of the multiple networks shown here means that the usefulness of the geographical parts of the map is limited – it gives you an idea of the lay of the land, but wouldn’t help very much for walking around the historical core of the town, for example. The sheer number of bus routes (I count around 40 or so) converging at the main railway station means that their route numbers have to be printed quite small, but it looks like they’re still legible enough. I’m hoping that the posters are printed nice and big, though!

I do like the added flexibility that 30-degree angles give to the layout, and I especially like how the main train line cuts a dead straight diagonal slash through the map: a lovely compositional axis. If you look towards the bottom right, you can see the town of Houten, whose bicycle network map we’ve featured previously on Transit Maps. Its historical Castellum district is rendered perfectly as a neat little pentagon; a lovely touch. The simple binary frequency legend (thick = frequent, thin = less frequent) is simple and intuitive. 

The colours that Jug has used are interesting, to say the least. The dark blue for the train lines establishes them at the top at the information hierarchy, while the cased yellow for the tram lines sets them nicely apart from the bus lines. Orange, purple, brown, pink and grass green are less conventional choices for the bus lines but it does make the map look strikingly different in a world dominated by primary-hued transit maps. The colours also seem to work relatively well when I put the map through Photoshop’s colour-blindness simulations, so that’s a plus. I’d venture that the overall colour palette is perhaps not to everyone’s taste, though it’s growing on me.

If you click through to Jug’s website, be sure to scroll down to the bottom for a detailed look at the design theory behind the redesign of this map. I’ve reproduced a couple of examples above: the first clearly shows how geographical maps of regional transit can waste a lot of space showing very little information, while the second shows how Jug has maintained the relative position of all the localities on the map, even as he’s simplified and stylised the layout. It’s all great stuff, and I highly recommend reading it all.

Our rating: More great work from one of Europe’s most singular mapping talents. Which city is next on his hit list, I wonder? Four stars.

Historical Map: Randwick/Coogee Buses (370, 372, 373, 374), Sydney, c. 1987

July 14, 2016
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A fairly bare-bones map showing the buses from the CBD and Central Station through Randwick and Coogee. It’s notable mainly for the inset that shows the service pattern in the city before the opening of the pedestrianised Pitt Street Mall (the main map shows the routing after the Mall’s opening). The Mall is now such an integral part of downtown Sydney that it’s sometimes hard to believe that it once wasn’t there.

This map also brings back memories as I spent two years commuting from Central to Randwick and back again on the 372 to attend design college in the early 1990s.

Source: Dave Murchie/Flickr

Poster: JR East “Slow Train, Slow Life” Campaign, 2016

July 12, 2016
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Now this I love! One of a series of posters celebrating the more relaxed pace of life along the northeast branch lines of JR East’s network in Japan. The posters are a collaborative effort led by artist Philippe Weisbecker, who has integrated (pretty detailed!) children’s drawings into the designs.

Source: JR East poster website via Taras Grescoe/Twitter

Photo – Official Map: New CTrain System Map, Calgary, Canada, 2016

July 6, 2016
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Here’s a look at a new system map for Calgary’s CTrain light rail system, as spotted by Natalie Sit when boarding one of the brand new LRVs yesterday. Conceptually and graphically, it’s much better than the previous map (February 2013, 2.5 stars) but there’s also something a little weird about it that I’ll get to later.

First things first! The big improvement in this map is the treatment of the downtown area, making it absolutely clear which stations are stopped at in each direction along 7th Avenue. The old map was worryingly vague about the situation, so this change is great to see. The additional information about when bicycles are permitted is also very welcome.

The positioning of labels is generally much better, although it’s unfortunate that the last three stations along each northern extension have to be flipped to the other side to accommodate other elements – the Calgary logo to the left and the marker for the airport bus to the right. The latter is particularly odd as the airport actually lies to the west of the route, not to the east.

Another oddity is the way the eastern part of the Blue Line jumps up to align with the Red Line as it leaves the downtown area, presumably to get it away from the label for the Victoria Park/Stampede station. However, things line up properly at the western end, so this just looks like poor design. The labels on the southern part of the Red Line could be shifted down slightly or respaced a fraction tighter to easily get the Blue Line in the right place.

Speaking of labels, can we get some consistency in how a separating slash “/” is used? Sometimes there’s no spaces between the slash and the letters on either side (typographically correct) and sometimes there’s a full space each side.

Now the odd thing. To my eye, this particular map looks like a inkjet print that’s been printed and trimmed (with a dull blade, check out the rough-edged paper) and mounted to the train interior, not a proper four-colour process commercial print. I also think that there’s evidence of a grey trim line along the top right edge, but I’m not 100-percent certain about that. The real giveaway (for me) is the quality of the text output: it’s very rough and has terrible kerning and tracking problems. Maybe the real map wasn’t ready in time for the launch of the spiffy new trains and this is a placeholder? If anyone in Calgary can get a closer look at this map and report back, I’d be very interested to hear if my suspicions are correct.

Our rating: A much better, clearer map than the previous one. Some suspicions that this isn’t quite the finished article yet, though. A provisional 3 stars.

Source: Natalie Sit/Twitter

Submission – Historical Map: BMT Nassau Street Line by Renzo Picasso, c.1930 (?)

June 29, 2016
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Submitted by Casira Copes, who says:

This is an image done by Renzo Picasso, the late Italian engineer and architect. He specialized in urban design and transit drawings, which I thought might be interesting for your blog! I’m currently working at the Archivio Renzo Picasso in Genoa, Italy where our goal is to expose his work to more people. He was not very well-known in his lifetime, but his drawings are pretty fascinating! He did traditional maps, 3D projections of various subway systems, and even some futuristic city plans for places like NYC! 

Check out www.renzopicasso.com if you’re interested in learning more about the artist.

Transit Maps says:

This awesome cutaway of Piccadilly Circus station by Renzo Picasso is one of the most popular posts on the site, so I’m thrilled to share another great cutaway by the artist – and submitted by his official archive as well!

This diagram is very interesting as it seems to show the BMT Nassau Street line as it would appear after the extension south from Chambers Street – connecting it to the Montague Street Tunnel – was constructed. This tunnel opened in 1931, and the diagram clearly states that it is “currently in construction”, so a date of around 1930 seems reasonable. 

Interestingly, the diagram shows a flyover track from Chambers Street to the Brooklyn Bridge. As far as I know, this was never constructed, although it shows up in plans for the station as far back as 1908. The bi-level Fulton Street station (with the northbound platform stacked directly beneath the southbound one) is also clearly seen.

Technically, this is just as beautifully drawn as the Piccadilly Circus cutaway, if a little less immediately dramatic. Mr. Picasso was a heck of a draftsman, that’s for sure!

Photo – Official Map: Strip Map for the Gold Coast Light Rail, Queensland, Australia

June 29, 2016
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Here’s a rare example of an illustrated strip map, used above the doors on the Gold Coast’s G:Link light rail vehicles in Australia. Despite my self-professed preference for clean, minimalist, ordered design, I actually love this map to bits.

Why? Because “sense of place” and community are the absolute winners here. The two-colour illustration style is charming and whimsical, while the instantly recognisable landmarks link the whole coast together from north to south. Most importantly, people are shown smiling and having fun, which is what the Gold Coast is meant to be about. I particularly like the way that the lining “route line” becomes breaking waves when the route gets nearer to the beaches. Fun!

Of course, this approach only works because the G:Line has one route: you can just read the big, bold and unmissable station names from one end of the map to the other to find your stop. Any split in the line to a different destination would be too hard to read with this illustration style.

Our rating: When you have but a single LRT line, you can have a bit of fun with the way it’s shown on a map. Joyous, bright and fun! Four stars.

Source: Brent Toderian/Twitter

Historical Maps: Prague Metro Book, 1978

June 28, 2016
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After I posted about this fantastic 1978 book celebrating the Moscow Metro, reader Martin Vrba let me know that he had a very similar contemporaneous book about Prague’s Metro, and was kind enough to send along some photos.

Of particular interest is the first map, which shows projected extensions to the 1978 system (shown as solid lines) all the way up to 1990. There’s a few differences, but it’s basically very similar to the system as it exists today. Also, there’s some changes in station names between then and now – the Soviet-era Leninova is now Dejvická, for example.

There’s lots to look at in the other pictures as well – plans of routes, cross-sections and elevations, even a diagram of the tunnel boring machine used.