All posts tagged: 1920

Project: Electric Streetcars and Interurbans of Yakima, Washington, 1920

October 25, 2021
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The third in my series of maps depicting electric streetcar networks of the Pacific Northwest, one that both builds on my previous maps of Spokane and Portland and adds something new to the mix: geography. The full project description follows, but you can view the map below or click here to view it in a full-screen window. At first sight, the Yakima streetcar and interurban network may not look quite as impressive as the other […]

Historical Map: Map of Kyoto and Vicinity, 1920

January 27, 2018
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Here’s a lovely old map of Kyoto, issued by the Miyako Hotel in 1920 for the benefit of its guests. The hotel is still there almost 100 years later, now owned by the Westin Group. The interurban streetcar to Otsu that once ran down the middle of the street in front of the hotel was abandoned in 1997, replaced by the underground Tōzai Line of the Kyoto Municipal Subway. The electric streetcars are displayed prominently on […]

Historical Map: Proposed Detroit Rapid Transit System, c. 1920

November 14, 2016
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A handsome aerial “birds-eye” rendering of a proposed elevated rapid transit system linking Detroit with Royal Oak, Birmingham, Pontiac and Rochester (as well as the Ford Motor Company plant and blast furnaces). The system was first proposed in 1915, with a working scale model presented to the Detroit city council (photo).  But by 1922, the company was still searching for land on which to erect one mile of test track for their unusual proprietary track system, […]

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. 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.

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 […]

Historical Map: Rapid Transit Plan by the City of Seattle, 1920

June 13, 2014
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Here’s an interesting map that shows a plan for rapid transit that city engineers envisioned for Seattle way back in 1920, almost 100 years ago! The map shows a subway running beneath Third Avenue from Virginia to Yesler, coming to the surface near the railroad stations – essentially the route followed by the present-day Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel. Trains going up to Capitol Hill would follow a line up Pine Street that would be alternately […]

Historical Map: Train and Tram Travel Times in Melbourne, Australia, c. 1920

May 5, 2014
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A handsome isochrone map produced by Melbourne’s Metropolitan Town Planning Commission to show the “minimum” (i.e., absolute best scenario) travel time into the city via suburban railways and tram lines. Some later additions to the network seem to have been pencilled in at the bottom right of the map. Side note: Wikipedia’s article on isochrone maps includes the incredibly lazy assertion that “isochrone maps have been used in transportation planning since 1972 or earlier”, simply because […]

Historical Map: Southern Pacific “Red Electric” Tracks in Downtown Portland, c. 1920

February 14, 2014
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Scanned from the book “The Red Electrics: Southern Pacific’s Oregon Interurbans” by Tom Dill and Walter Grande. This handsome map shows the routing of the Southern Pacific’s electric interurban trains through downtown Portland from their northern terminus at Union Station. These trains, popularly known as the “Red Electrics” after their distinctive carriages, ran from Portland all the way down the Willamette Valley as far as Corvallis, 85 miles distant. Service started in 1914, extended to […]

Historical Map: Tramways System of Perth, Australia, 1920

September 20, 2013
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An absolutely lovely official government map of Perth’s burgeoning tram network in 1920. The Western Australian state government had taken over the system from private operators just a few years prior to this. The alternating colours along the routes would seem to indicate fare segments, at a penny per segment. Five pence fare to Nedlands! The map is beautifully drawn, and has two cleverly integrated insets to show the longer routes out to Osborne Park […]

Historical Map: Plans for New York Subway Expansion, 1920

April 5, 2013
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I found out about this awesome map from a tweet from Vanshnookenraggen (otherwise known as Andrew Lynch) just the other day. Originally, I was just going to post the black and white map from the 1920 New York Times article that the original blog post references, but then I realised that the image on the blog linked to a super high resolution PDF of the map. As I found the map in the newspaper article […]