All posts tagged: passenger rail

Historical Map: Southern Pacific “Red Electric” Tracks in Downtown Portland, c. 1920

February 14, 2014
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Scanned from the book “The Red Electrics: Southern Pacific’s Oregon Interurbans” by Tom Dill and Walter Grande. This handsome map shows the routing of the Southern Pacific’s electric interurban trains through downtown Portland from their northern terminus at Union Station. These trains, popularly known as the “Red Electrics” after their distinctive carriages, ran from Portland all the way down the Willamette Valley as far as Corvallis, 85 miles distant. Service started in 1914, extended to […]

“Discover Japan” Map of Japanese Rail Routes, May 2012

February 14, 2014
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A handsome diagrammatic map of rail services throughout Japan, this one from an issue of the “Discover Japan” magazine (Vol. 21, Issue 4) that seemed to deal mainly with seeing Japan by train. Without the benefit of a translation for the map’s legend, I’d guess that the thick green lines are Shinkansen lines, blue ones are regional trains and brown lines are local/other services (Update: @suldrew has let me know that it’s Green = Shinkansen, […]

Official Maps: Transportation at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

February 11, 2014
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A few requests for these very topical maps, so here goes! The XXII Winter Games are now in full swing, but how do spectators get around? The Games are divided into two very distinct zones: the Olympic Park down by the Black Sea in Sochi itself for all the indoor sports; and the Mountain Zone, some 50 kilometres (31 miles) up into the Caucasus Mountains, where all the sports that actually require snow are held. […]

Historical Map: The Plan of Chicago – Proposed Arrangement of Railroad Stations, 1909

January 10, 2014
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A plate from the hugely influential 1909 Plan of Chicago (also known as “the Burnham Plan” after its primary author, the renowned architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham) showing proposed amendments and additions to the railroads of the city. The thin red lines show main line railroads, which were going to be rerouted to two mega-stations to the south and west of the downtown area. To facilitate movement between these stations, an ambitious plan of subterranean […]

Official Map: TILO Commuter Rail – Ticino, Switzerland and Lombardy, Italy, 2014

January 7, 2014
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The emergence of a unified Europe has led to a gradual but noticeable blurring of borders between countries in Europe, which now seem to often exist only on maps. With free and easy travel between the European countries that are bound by the Schengen Agreement, it’s not impossible for people to live in one country and work in another, especially when they live close to a border. This map shows transit services in such an […]

Unofficial Map: Hand-Drawn Danish InterCity Train Network

December 5, 2013
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Submitted by Halid Karpović, who says: It’s Halid again, who’s already submitted you the transit diagram of Sarajevo. This time, I’ve got something I’ve made myself. When I was on vacation in Denmark a while ago, I got a leaflet with timetables of the Danish InterCity lines, operated by DSB. Then, I took a pencil and four sheets of paper and drew a transit diagram with its help. Et voilà, this is the result! I’d be […]

Unofficial Map: Suburban Rail Network of Mumbai, India

December 2, 2013
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Designed by two students – Jaikishan and Snehal – at Mumbai’s Industrial Design Centre under the supervision of Associate Professor Mandar Rane. While it looks like quite a traditional transit map, there’s a few innovations and design choices (of which some work, and some don’t) that make it interesting to study. First off, this map is infinitely better than the official one, which is a bit of a mess however you look at it. Normally, I’m not a huge […]

Historical Map: The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe “Disneyland” Map, 1956

November 22, 2013
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A simply gorgeous mid-1950s map of the AT&SF’s passenger routes, taken from a promotional brochure produced in conjunction with Disneyland, which is shown prominently to the right of the map. The brochure was ostensibly an introduction to the Santa Fe & Disneyland Railroad at Disneyland, then only a year old. Understandably, the AT&SF – who had basically bankrolled construction of the 5/8th scale railroad – were keen to get some return in their investment. As […]

Historical Map: The Burlington Route (Chicago to San Francisco), 1879

November 6, 2013
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Here’s a beautiful map from the glory days of American railroading, showing the route from Chicago to San Francisco via Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. Amtrak’s modern-day California Zephyr still calls at many of the same locations between Chicago and Omaha to the east and from Elko to Oakland in the west, but takes a different route through the middle, using Colorado instead of Wyoming. Although presented as one continuous route, the […]