All posts tagged: tube

Official Map: Bicycles on the London Underground

May 17, 2016
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One of the things I love about the London Underground is the seemingly endless cavalcade of official Tube maps: the normal map, large print, color-blind friendly, step-free access, geographical… and now this: where and when you’re allowed to bring your bike.  Foldable bikes are allowed pretty much everywhere (but not during peak travel times, please!), but full-size bikes are much more limited in where they can go. In general, the allowed areas for such bikes […]

Historical Map: Ghost Stations of the London Underground

January 3, 2014
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The Underground has been around so long, and its famous Diagram so ingrained in our heads, that we tend to think of it as an immutable object: always the same, never changing. That’s absolutely not so, as this fantastic reworking of the Tube Diagram shows. Shown here are the 40-plus “ghost stations” of the London Underground – stations that once existed as part of the “Tube”, but no longer do, for varying reasons. Some stations […]

Historical Map: New York City’s Pneumatic Tube Mail System

January 3, 2014
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Not a transit map in the usual sense of carrying passengers, this map instead depicts a network that conveyed mail at speeds of up to 35mph under the streets of New York from 1897 to 1953 (barring a small gap during World War I when it was shut down to conserve funds for the war effort). This map probably shows the system at its height pre-WWI, with over 27 miles of tube. Even then, the […]

Historical Map: Bank-Monument Tube Stations Cutaway (1990s?)

July 17, 2013
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Cutaway Maps, Historical Maps
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Not a traditional transit map per se, but a stunningly beautiful technical illustration of the interlinking tubes and tunnels that form the connected Bank-Monument tube station complex in London. Built as separate stations, but linked by escalators in the 1930s (the depiction of which proved a permanent puzzle for H.C. Beck on his Tube Map), the complex is the ninth-busiest London Underground station, What I love here is that we’re looking at over 100 years […]

Photo: Charing Cross Road, London, 1995

July 9, 2013
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What a fantastic photo! More than anything, it illustrates how people actually use maps in real life. Now that a destination has been reached via the Tube, a street map is required for the next stage of the journey. There’s some serious study of that map going on here! Also, look at the Tube map on the wall behind our geographically-challenged subject. Charing Cross Road goes right past Leicester Square tube station, where I’m almost […]

“Storylines”: the Literary London Tube Map by Anna Burles

December 20, 2012
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Storylines London’s iconic tube map is transformed into a pit-stop journey through classic styles of storytelling, with the individual tube lines turned into genres and sub genres of literature. The depths of the Northern Line are made over into the aptly named Horror Line. The Bakerloo Line coursing past Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street becomes, of course, the Crime & Mystery Line. And the pink trajectory of the Hammersmith & City is converted to the Romance […]

Fantasy Map: London Underground Map from “The Escapist”

November 5, 2012
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Here’s another transit map made as a prop for a film, but with considerably more style and skill that the weird alternate universe DC Subway map for “Leverage” featured a while ago. At first glance, this prop – made for the 2008 film, “The Escapist” – looks like an exact replica of Harry Beck’s unusual and short-lived 1941 London Underground diagram, which uses 30- and 60-degree angles and “Olympic Ring” style station interchanges. Everything is […]

Unofficial Map: London Tube Map as Electrical Circuit Board by Yuri Suzuki

September 10, 2012
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Created for an exhibition at the London Design Museum, I believe this is also a functional radio as well as a kick-ass representation of the London Underground. The intricate level of detail just has to be seen to be believed. Can I have one? I’ve seen a few comments around the Internet that this piece brings the Tube Map full circle as Harry Beck was an electrical draughtsman who based his design off circuit diagrams. […]

Historical Map: Diagram Showing London’s Underground Railways, Power Stations, Substations, 1933

June 18, 2012
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Here’s a fascinating reworking of Harry Beck’s original 1933 Tube map that I haven’t seen before. Apparently it’s from an article in a journal from November 1933 that details the work required to upgrade the electrical services on the Underground. Apart from the stark black and white treatment and addition of the power stations and substations, what’s really interesting about this map are the little tweaks and changes that have already occurred since the first […]