All posts tagged: Europe

Historical Map: Map of Glasgow Corporation Transport Services, c. 1934

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A handsomely drawn map that does some sterling work with just three colours (a very modern combination of black, cyan and magenta!). Of particular note is the clever way that a solid magenta line (bus service), can be combined with a dashed black line (trams) to indicate where both types of transportation share the same route without having to draw two separate lines. Interestingly, buses appear to have route numbers, while trams are designated by […]

Submission – Unofficial Maps: Redesigned “INAT” Metro Maps of the World by Jug Cerovic

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Submitted by Jug , who says: I completed a set of new schematic metro maps of 12 cities using a common standard. I have tried to make easy to read, memorize and use maps but at the same time pleasant looking. Crowded centers are enlarged and specific features such as ring lines highlighted. You can see all the maps here. Transit Maps says: You all know that I love an ambitious transit mapping project, and this is […]

Proposed Map: Moscow Tram Network by nOne Digital & Branding Agency

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Sent my way for comments by the agency, here’s a very slick proposal for a new map for Moscow’s tram network. As a westerner, I was only very dimly aware that Moscow even has a tram network (the Metro grabs the spotlight), but it’s actually the fourth most extensive such network in the world, with 181km of combined route length. The three larger networks are Berlin (190km), St. Petersburg (220km), and Melbourne, Australia (254km). At […]

Historical Maps: Railroad Spiral Tunnels of the Gotthardbahn, 1914

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In my previous post, I mentioned that the map of the Gotthardbahn showed the spiral tunnels that the track uses to quickly change elevation in areas with limited space. Here are some fantastic maps of those spirals, taken from a 1914 German encyclopaedia and found on Wikipedia. The maps show the spirals from north to south, with the distance in kilometres from the northern end of the line clearly shown along the route. The Gotthard […]

Historical Map: Gotthardbahn (Switzerland and Italy), 1898

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Here’s a beautiful Art Nouveau railway poster promoting the Gotthardbahn that links northern Italy with Switzerland and points north through the famous Gotthard Tunnel. At the time of opening in 1882, the tunnel was the longest railway tunnel in the world at 15 kilometres (9.3 miles). The map shows the then privately-operated Gotthardbahn and its branch routes in thick black lines (the Swiss Railways incorporated the line into its national network in 1907). The tunnel […]

Fantasy Map: Highways of the Netherlands Diagram by AS Veen

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Inspired by (but not derivative of) my own Interstates as Subway Map, here’s a nice diagrammatic take on the “A-Road” highway network of the Netherlands. It’s a relatively simple system, so the one-colour approach used here works quite well. It also illustrates the European tendency for major highways to bypass or loop around a city, rather than putting an Interstate right through the middle of downtown, as so often happens here in the U.S. Design-wise, […]

Historical Map: Hamburg Hoch- und Untergrundbahn, c. 1912

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A beautiful old map showing Hamburg’s Ringbahn and spur lines. I believe that this map is from no later than January 1912, and it may be from even earlier, as the legend denotes that all the routes shown in red (the beginnings of today’s U-Bahn system) are “intended for execution” – that is, planned or under construction, not actually built. Construction of the Ringbahn began in 1906, and the first section between Rathaus and Barmbek […]

Official Map: Integrated Transit of Südtirol (Alto Adige), Italy

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Sent my way by a reader known only as “mmmaps”, here’s a map of the transit system of the northern autonomous Italian province of Südtirol (South Tyrol in English, or Alto Adige in Italian). The system is mainly made up of buses (dark blue), but there’s also a backbone of rail services between the major cities (shown in light blue) and aerial cable-cars as well. While the restrained colour palette (just blues and greys) looks quite […]

Unofficial Map: Transit of Riga, Latvia by Viteks Bariševs

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Transit Maps has been keeping an eye on this project for quite some time now: I reviewed an earlier version of this map way back in January 2012, noting that it held a lot of promise for the future. At the time, Viteks was hopeful that he could get his map adopted as Riga’s official transit map. While that hasn’t quite happened yet, he’s definitely set himself up as an excellent alternative to the (pretty […]