All posts tagged: photo

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

April 3, 2014
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Historical Maps
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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 […]

Highways Project Print Sample!

April 3, 2014
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My Transit Maps
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I got my first test print back from the printers today: a sample of the Texas map. Basically, I’m ecstatic with the way things are looking – all the research and effort I’ve put into this over the last one-and-a-half years is so, so worth it. Just a few more little behind the scenes things to put into place and I’ll be ready to share this project with you all. Have I mentioned that I’m […]

Historical Photo: Streetcars on an Inclined Railway, Cincinnati, 1904

March 18, 2014
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Not a map, but included because this is possibly the strangest piece of transit infrastructure I’ve ever seen. Discovered while researching the post about Cincinnati’s abandoned subway, this photo shows what happened when that city’s streetcars met the steep hills surrounding the downtown area. At this time, the streetcars were used in conjunction with four of Cincinnati’s five inclined railways: the Mount Adams Incline, Mount Auburn Incline, Bellevue Incline, and the Fairview Incline. The cars […]

Photo: A Washington DC Metro strip map that’s just bound to cause confusion…

March 16, 2014
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Here’s an example of an overly designed strip map that’s gone horribly wrong. This photo was taken by Bryan Rodda, who notes that the sign makes it appear that Foggy Bottom-GWU is the name of the main interchange station between the Silver, Blue and Orange Lines in the center of the photo. Anyone who knows the DC Metro system will know that the station in question is actually Rosslyn, but the map makes this horribly […]

Photo: Boston Layers

March 7, 2014
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An old Boston T map peeks out from underneath the broken remnants of a recent edition, somewhere along the Orange Line in May 2013. It’s interesting to see that while the two maps occupy the same physical space, their use of it is much different. The older, simpler map fills up its space with bold lines and large type, while the modern map is more geographically based and complex – with the addition of bus […]

Submission – Historical Map: Los Angeles Metro, 1997

February 10, 2014
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From reader Chris Bastian comes this awesome old photo of an early Los Angeles Metro map, dated precisely to the 14th of November 1997, thanks to our old friend the date stamp. The map is incredibly primitive compared to today’s polished effort, with unevenly spaced stations, labels at all sorts of angles, clumsy integration of Metrolink services, and lots of big, ugly call-out boxes. However, we can see that by 1997, the Blue and Green […]

Submission – Official Historical Map: MBTA Map in Chinese, c. 1985

January 30, 2014
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Submitted by Randy Wong, who says: The MBTA map in Chinese characters. These used to be posted at the Orange Line Chinatown T-stop, and also at a few of the other lines that intersected/were near Chinese speakers. There are lots of Chinese who live near Malden, Oak Grove, Chinatown, Forest Hills, Quincy, and Quincy Center T-stops, though I don’t recall which stops actually had Chinese T maps. Transit Maps says: Nice localisation of the classic […]