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. Source: ausdew/Flickr
Here at Transit Maps, we love a good cutaway diagram of station layouts, and this one is a classic. Sent our way by David Auerbach, it shows the combined Paris Métro/RER Châtelet–Les Halles complex in Paris – a transit hub so massive that Métro Line 4 has two separate stations within it! On this diagram, the white SNCF tunnels shown as “en projet” correspond to the modern RER Line D, which began service in 1987 […]
Here’s a fantastic (if slightly idealised) view of the then still-under-construction State Street Subway from a c.1940 postcard. This view looks northward along State Street from Adams, and shows the Monroe-Adams mezzanine. Note the direct access from the mezzanine level to the basement level of businesses on either side of State Street – now long since closed. Text on the reverse side of the postcard reads: Cut-away view of Chicago’s subway in the Central Business District. […]
Submitted by thesandpeople100, who says: Cutaway diagram of the Paris Metro’s Opera station. I came across this working on a project for a hypothetical addition to Palais Garnier but couldn’t find any information on its origin. Any ideas? Transit Maps says: A reverse image search on Google found the answer to this pretty quickly: this beautiful cutaway appeared in the July 1910 issue of Popular Mechanics. Unfortunately, this month isn’t available in Google Books’ archive of […]
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 […]
Submitted by Piotr Ingling, who says: Not exactly a transit map but seeing your post with NY subway stations drawings recalled me this one. It’s a photo that I took in Dec 2004 – unfortunately it seems that the board has been removed long time ago during renovation works. I hope it is preserved somewhere. There are two levels here for metro and trams (underground part of tram network is called pre-metro as it’s ready […]
I’m really liking these fantastic axonometric projections of New York Subway station complexes by architect Candy Chan. This type of view isn’t anything revolutionary or new – see this fabulous diagram of London’s Piccadilly Circus tube station from 1929, for example – but these are all executed very deftly. The cleverly exaggerated vertical scale does a good job of preventing upper platforms and mezzanine levels from obscuring important detail below them, while the street level […]
We all know that I love a good cutaway diagram, and this example – drawn by Italian architect and urban designer, Renzo Picasso (no relation) – is just superb. Drawn in 1929, coinciding with the opening of Charles Holden’s sub-surface circular booking hall which replaced the original 1906 above-ground Leslie Green-designed station building. The unusual perspective, halfway between the platform level and the (invisible) roads above, permits a wonderful level of clarity in the drawing. […]
Here’s a lovely cutaway view of Hermannplatz station, at the intersection of what is now U7 (the lower platform here, running east-west) and U8 (the platform above, running north-south). The map also shows the pedestrian tunnels that connected the station directly with the basement of the monumental Karstadt department store, then one of the largest in the world. However – probably for reasons of clarity – the diagram places the entrance in the first basement […]
Simply stunning cutaway cross-section of the London Tube station now known as Embankment in 1914. This drawing shows the station just after the opening of the new deep tube extension of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway (now part of the Northern Line) from their previous terminus to the north at Charing Cross station. The extension was a single line that headed south from Charing Cross, looped back around underneath the Thames and had a […]
