A lovely example of British Rail’s house style of the 1960s and 70s, now residing at the East Anglian Railway Museum. This map is from between 1965 (the introduction of the “double-arrow” British Rail identity), and 1978 (when the “Eastern” component of the logo changed from sitting in an outlined box to a solid box like the British Rail text). Can anyone date it more definitively? Source: Deptford Draylons/Flickr
In St. Petersburg, Russia. Actually, now that I come to think of it, the SNCF map in the ticket hall in Gare Montparnasse in Paris is pretty damn huge, too. Source: 2 Girlz Loving Life/Flickr
Following on from the previous post about Luxembourg, here’s another nationwide system map that resembles a subway map, this time for Luxembourg’s neighbour, Belgium – the land of beer, frites and Tintin! Have we been there? Yes, during my European jaunt in 2003. I caught trains from Brussels to Ghent, Ghent to Bruges, Bruges to Ypres and Ypres back to Brussels. What we like: Nice simplification of a relatively complex network. Major hubs are treated […]
I guess when your entire country is the size of a large city, you’re allowed to show your rail network in the form of a subway map. Source: davidwilson1949/Flickr
Here’s a fantastic map out of England in the mid-60s, showing British Rail service in the Greater London area. It’s almost staggering to think that a map this well drawn was created without the use of computers. I definitely recommend clicking through to the large image on Flickr to savour all the beautiful, crisp linework: this map is technically excellent. Have we been there? Yes, and I’ve used many of the great London terminus stations, […]
Almost everyone credits Harry Beck with “inventing” the diagrammatic transit map in 1933 with his iconic London Underground map. But the diagram form had already been in use for a number of years before that, as shown in this delightful 1929 diagram for LNER suburban services out of London’s Kings Cross station to points north. It was designed by George Dow, who created many such diagrams for the LNER. His son, Andrew Dow, wrote a […]
Clever work here from the German office of Ogilvy Advertising, taking the familiar iconography of a typical German-styled U-Bahn map and applying it — and its associated promises of rapid, frequent service — to the Germany-wide ICE (high-speed train) network. My only problem with this work is that the shape of the network bears little resemblance to Germany itself, probably because of the landscape format of the bilboard. Source: Viralbuzz.de and Design Made in Germany
If you visit Paris, you need to use the Metro to get around, so it’s a good thing that its map is up to the task. It took Paris a long time to come around to a diagrammatic approach (Harry Beck created two versions on spec, but both were rejected), and earlier diagrams were not as successful as this – one had all vertical lines set at a jaunty 15-degree angle, which made the whole […]
Somewhat related to my previous post, here’s a new transit map of Portland for your perusal. This piece was born out of two things – a friendly after-work chat with the immensely talented Ryan Sullivan of Paste In Place, where we discussed a concept similar to this; and a chance discovery of a high-resolution scan of a 1943 streetcar/trolley map on the amazing Vintage Oregon site. Based on that map, and information gleaned from too […]
Presenting my next transit-styled diagram, this time showing all the high speed train routes that pass through France. This includes the French (SNCF) TGV trains, the Eurostar trains from London, the Thalys services from Belgium and the Netherlands, and some ICE services from Germany that operate in tandem with corresponding TGV services from France. It does not show high speed trains that do not pass through France: for example, the ICE train from Amsterdam to Germany […]
