All posts tagged: passenger rail

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, […]

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. […]