All posts tagged: heavy rail

Historical Map: WMATA Metro Planning Map, 1968

July 24, 2014
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Via ddotdc: WMATA planning map, dated March 1, 1968 and last revised by the WMATA Board on June 11, 1970.  Please view a full-size, searchable version of the map. (Navigational tools are at the bottom of the map.) On March 1, 1968, WMATA officially adopted a 97.2 mile regional system in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. On February 7, 1969, WMATA revisited the rapid rail plan and relocated three of the stations, calling instead […]

Historical Map: San Francisco BART & Buses Map, September 1977

June 17, 2014
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Front cover for a 1977 map of BART and connecting bus services with some great late-1970s typography: tightly spaced Helvetica, yum! That BART icon is also pretty amazing and is just asking to be digitally recreated. However, there’s something screwy about that map, as much of BART appears to be located in or underneath the San Francisco Bay. Global warming, perhaps? Hardly: some quick Photoshop analysis reveals that  the underlying map has simply been erroneously rotated […]

Historical Map: Opening of the Los Angeles Metro Red Line, January 30, 1993

May 27, 2014
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A very simple map showing the first segment of Los Angeles’ Red Line on its opening in January 1993. The Blue Line (part of which is also shown on this map) had opened three years earlier. The map is mainly notable for the “RTD” logo that belonged to the Southern California Regional Transit District, the immediate ancestor of today’s Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA, or more commonly, just “Metro”). In fact, the LACMTA […]

Fantasy Future Map: Sydney, Australia by Thomas Mudgway

May 15, 2014
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Thomas, who is a ninth-grader (i.e., he’s just 14 or 15 years old), says: Sydney, my home town, has around 4.7 million people and already has a commuter rail network, however, the city is growing, and the network doesn’t cover everything, so I have augmented the network in many places, as well as showing how it could grow into the currently undeveloped far south- and north-west (they are generally the places where the stations have […]

Victorian Rail Network – Concept Map, April 2014

April 15, 2014
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Here’s an interesting proposed new map out of Australia which combines Melbourne’s suburban rail network with the V/Line passenger rail service. In a way, this makes sense, as many of V/Line’s services act as commuter rail services from surrounding cities like Geelong. With the introduction of the myki farecard, much of the V/Line network now even shares the same ticketing system, as shown on the map by use of a solid grey route line. However, it […]

Submission – Historical Map: Chicago Regional Transportation Authority, 1977

April 4, 2014
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Submitted by Dennis McClendon, who has previously submitted material related to transit mapping in Chicago that I’ve featured on the site. This map is a real beauty, and I definitely appreciate Dennis’ ability to talk about the technical aspects of cartography in the days before computers. We take computer-aided design almost completely for granted today – but map-making was a laborious, manually performed task back then, where a scalpel, a light box and rubylith film […]

Submission – Unofficial MARTA (Atlanta, Georgia) Map by Andrew Whited

February 12, 2014
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Now this I like! Part of an overall identity project for MARTA that Andrew completed, here’s his stylish revision of the system map (I reviewed the official one way, way back in October 2011, giving it a pretty generous 3 stars). The MARTA system isn’t that complex – essentially only having two intersecting trunk lines with a couple of branches – so simplifying it down and abstracting it like this works really well. The slightly […]

Unofficial Map: Washington DC Metro Map by Peter Dovak

December 13, 2013
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An interesting approach to an alternative DC Metro map by Peter Dovak, who previously submitted this fantasy light rail map of Louisville, Kentucky.  There’s quite a bit to like here: I love the circular abstraction of the beltway highway around DC, which is then centred perfactly around the District diamond. Peter’s even made sure that the “square” formed by the three main interchange stations – Metro Center, Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza – sits at […]

Submission – Unofficial Map: Sydney Trains Aerial Image

November 4, 2013
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Submitted by thatlattesipper. Sydney Trains routes (complete with new “T-line” branding) for the north and west of the city overlaid on a Google Earth image. If nothing else, this map reminds us of how staggeringly huge Greater Sydney really is. It’s 20 kilometres in a straight line from the dot representing Central Station at the lower left to Hornsby (just off the right of the map), and over 30km from Central to Prospect Reservoir, the […]