All posts tagged: interurban

Historical Map: San Joaquin County, California, c. 1910

October 11, 2023
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Here’s a beautiful old illustrative map – this is from a prospectus advertising the benefits of settling in San Joaquin County, California in 1910. Part of depicting this as a desirable place to live and do business is showing the multitude of modern railway lines – including several electric interurbans – almost all of which seem to converge upon Stockton, neatly in the middle of the map. This being an advertising tool, the situation shown […]

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 […]

Project: A Map of Electric Streetcars in Portland, Oregon, 1915

August 22, 2021
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Here’s a map that’s been a long time coming, and one that I think has been worth the wait. I’ve wanted to make a transit map of historical streetcar routes in my adopted home town of Portland, Oregon for at least five years now, but it’s always seemed like a very daunting task. The success of my historical Spokane streetcar map from earlier this year finally gave me the tools I needed to get this […]

Project: A Map of Electric Rail Service in Spokane, Washington in 1912

March 17, 2021
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Old streetcar maps often do a very poor job of actually showing how the routes ran – often just drawing an otherwise unmarked red line down the middle of roads on a standard cartographic map without any explanation of stops, loops or route names (see left for an example). Finding accurate information about the actual routing of individual lines can be a long and thankless process, so when long-time Transit Maps correspondent Karl Otterstrom tweeted […]

Submission – A History of San Francisco Area Street Rail Transit by Travis Emick

February 19, 2021
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Submitted by Travis, who says: I made an animated visualization of the light rail infrastructure of San Francisco from 1850–to–nowish. I was wondering if you would be interested in posting! Transit Maps says: I sure would be, Travis! This is a great 15-minute video that succinctly outlines the rise and fall of rail-based street transit in San Francisco, Oakland and even Marin County. The sheer number of competing companies in the early years is quite […]

Historical Map: Proposed Mass Transit System, Milwaukee WI, 1948

October 27, 2020
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Milwaukee dreaming big in the last days of rail-based mass transit in that city. I can’t find many specifics about this plan, though I do know that the City was attempting to purchase the transit lines in Milwaukee from its private operators at the time, so this study may have something to do with that. On this map, the thin black lines represent local services, probably a mix of diesel bus, “trackless trolley” and streetcar […]

Historical Map: Proposed Telephone Despatching System of the International Railway Co, Buffalo, 1903

August 16, 2020
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This spectacular diagram from the February 28, 1903 edition of the Street Railway Journal looks for all the world like a modern schematic diagram of the International Railway Company’s lines, but there’s a bit of a twist in the tale. It’s actually a diagram of a telephonic dispatching system that the company was planning to install on its city and interurban lines, replacing a mixed telegraph/phone system. As telegraphs needed a skilled operator at every […]

Historical Map – Vancouver City and Suburban Lines, 1923

July 24, 2020
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A charmingly simple two-colour map of streetcar and interurban lines operated by the British Columbia Electric Railway Co. in 1923. Almost everything is hand-drawn and lettered apart from the map’s title, some explanatory text and some line numbers along the streets with more services (13-14-15-16 along Broadway West, for example). This last makes me wonder if this information was added to this edition of the map, either having been previously omitted or the lines servicing […]

Historical Map: Interurban Trips Over Vancouver, B.C. Electric Railway System, 1913

November 11, 2019
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A handsome birds-eye map of the extensive interurban electric railway network extending from Vancouver as far away as Chilliwack. An inset map shows the lines on Vancouver Island, though not terribly efficiently, as much space is devoted to showing the power transmission lines from the Jordan River power house. There’s lots of great little details on the map, like little interurban trains running along the route lines, steam trains shown on the main line and […]

Historical Map: Map of Interurban Lines and Trolley Observation Trip, Portland Electric Power Company, c. 1923

September 6, 2018
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Here’s a handsome map of electric rail transportation in and around Portland, Oregon that – somewhat curiously – I hadn’t come across before. For the most part, it correlates with my own research into the network in the 1920s, though there are two little stub lines shown that I haven’t previously seen on any other map. The first of these is a branch on the Oregon City interurban from the Gladstone stop eastwards a short […]