All posts tagged: passenger rail

Submission – Fantasy Map: Pacific Northwest (USA and Canada) Regional Rail

June 2, 2014
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Submitted by opspe, who says: This is my concept for what an integrated regional inter-city rail network in the Northwest could look like, if things had developed that way.  All there is now (regionally) is Cascades, which I ride all the time, but it’s still rather limited.  I decided to include the local commuter rail lines (WES, Sounder, WCE) too.  I also decided to beef up CalTrans a bit – they don’t actually serve Redding, although it’s […]

Future Official Map: Pearl River Delta Rapid Transit

May 25, 2014
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Sent my way by David Edmondson of The Greater Marin, this is an incredibly large (the dimensions of the PDF are 145″ x 101″ or 386cm x 256cm!) and very comprehensive map of the planned Pearl River Delta Rapid Transit system. Currently under construction, the idea behind the system is to have every major urban area in the region to be less than an hour away from Guangzhou (the huge urban area in the blue […]

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 […]

Historical Map: Train and Tram Travel Times in Melbourne, Australia, c. 1920

May 5, 2014
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A handsome isochrone map produced by Melbourne’s Metropolitan Town Planning Commission to show the “minimum” (i.e., absolute best scenario) travel time into the city via suburban railways and tram lines. Some later additions to the network seem to have been pencilled in at the bottom right of the map. Side note: Wikipedia’s article on isochrone maps includes the incredibly lazy assertion that “isochrone maps have been used in transportation planning since 1972 or earlier”, simply because […]

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: Transportation in the Backwaters of Kerala, India

April 11, 2014
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Submitted by Jim McNeill, who says: Kerala in southern India is famed for its backwaters, a popular holiday destination for people to cruise in rented houseboats. I was amazed to see a transit map of the area, and not a bad one at that. I was impressed at the attempt to show road, train, boat and air all on the same map. Granted it’s not perfect, the ferry crossings become maze like in the centre […]

Historical Map/Photo: Installing an Enormous Northern Pacific RR Map, 1917

April 3, 2014
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A fantastic photo that shows a huge map being installed through a window at the Northern Pacific offices in St. Paul, Minnesota. The short article that accompanied the photo when it was first published in Popular Mechanics in February 1917 says: A railway map of enormous size was recently installed in the immigration department of the Northern Pacific Railway offices in St. Paul. It measures 69 ft. long and 11 ft. wide and required the […]

Historical Map: Gotthardbahn (Switzerland and Italy), 1898

March 28, 2014
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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 […]

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

March 1, 2014
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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 […]

Historical Map: “Future Growth and Improvement” Map for Lansing, Michigan, 1921

February 27, 2014
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Here’s a simply beautiful map from the 1920s, showing a comprehensive proposed future plan for the city. Along with the extensive and fastidious plans for the extension of the city’s street grid (the web of red extending outwards from the core), the map also shows existing and proposed streetcars with solid and dashed thicker red lines, respectively. The map also audaciously proposes that the main line railroads be placed onto an elevated viaduct through downtown, […]