A handsome hand-drawn map of the entire D.C. Transit streetcar network from August 1958, less than four years before the system closed entirely. The map was drawn by Charles Wagner, who was an active member of the Washington, DC chapter of the Electric Railway Historical Society in the 1950s, an august body that still exists to this day. Source: Discover DC History archive (link no longer active)
Submitted by Thierry. A very stylish diagrammatic map of tramways (coloured lines) and bus routes (dotted black lines). This city’s historic centre is shaded grey, while the site of Expo 58 (or the Brussels World’s Fair) is given much prominence to the top left of the map. There’s a lovely economy of line in this map: everything serves a purpose and there’s a definite minimalist clarity in the design. Quite lovely.
A page from a high school geography text book depicting the major railways and operating regions of France. Notable mainly for the eye-popping candy-striping of the regions. Although the source on Flickr says the book dates from 1958, I’m pretty certain it’s a reprinted edition of an older book, as the train moderne at the top of the page seems to be a streamlined “Pacific” 4-6-2 steam engine, popular in Europe in the late 1930s. […]
No seriously: a museum devoted to ramen (in all honesty, it actually sounds pretty awesome). This map is found on the main floor of the museum, where nine restaurants serve different styles of ramen from Japan and around the world in a faithfully recreated Japanese streetscape from 1958 – the year that instant ramen was invented. As to which transit system it represents, I can’t even begin to guess. The original post on Flickr posits […]
Here’s a fantastic photo showing three versions of the map for the Stockholms tunnelbana, probably taken at the Stockholm Transit Museum. By comparing the three maps and the looking at the stations shown on each of them, I’ve roughly dated each as follows. The top map is from between November 19, 1958 (when the Farsta station opened), and November 14, 1959, when Rågsved station (shown on the middle map, but not on the top one) opened. The […]
