Historical Map: Isometric S-Bahn Map, Stuttgart, 2007

Really?

After all this time running this blog, only now do I find out that the incredible isometric Stuttgart U- and S-Bahn map (October 2011, 5 stars) has an S-Bahn-only sibling?

If anything, this is actually even better than that map: fewer route lines leads to more graphical simplicity. Like that map, however, it’s since been replaced with something disappointingly normal.

(Source: shelbycearley/Flickr)

Submitted by Cedric Krummes, who says:

Shot of the Leipzig Transport Authority Map (Germany). I was waiting for the Number 9 back to the Hauptbahnhof where I would take the Number 15.

Notice the Circle: suggesting the ring road in the city centre but maybe also trying to be like the Moscow Metro - Leipzig WAS part of the German Democratic Republic after all…

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Great photo of a well-worn map, Cedric. You can definitely see how this map benefits from being reproduced at a large size: as I commented in my review of this map (January 2012, 4 stars), this map is very detailed and information-dense and needs some time to absorb propoerly.

Unofficial Map: Live Map of London Underground Trains

Submitted by Travertine Libertine without comment.

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Transit Maps says:

Created by Matthew Somerville.

Totally hypnotic after a while as all those little yellow train dots start racing around (it kind of reminds me of a mash-up between the Scotland Yard board game and the original Railroad Tycoon). Childhood reminiscing done, it really is amazing what can be done with raw data pulled via an API these days. Stuff like this is the future of transit information.

Official Map: Opolskie Voivodeship Railway Network, Poland

The whole map is a bit of a mess, with all sorts of random angles everywhere (both route lines and station labels), but what really takes this map into the land of the bizarre are the big photos of trains superimposed over it. It’s like someone said, “Hey, there’s a bit of white space left over — what can we fill it up with? I know! How about some shots of our trains, and we’ll rotate them so it looks like they’re travelling along the tracks? That’s a great idea!”

NOT. One-and-a-half stars.

(Source: szogun000/Flickr)

All Aboard the Orient Express!

Here’s an absolutely charming little map found on the inside of a French model train set box lid. I don’t have a definitive date for this, but it does have a lovely retro feel to it.

The map itself isn’t much help, as it’s pretty much a work of fiction: a weird combination of different parts of the Orient Express’s historical routes (see this diagram on Wikipedia) and a branch to Warsaw via Prague that was never part of the train’s itinerary.

Maybe, as simple artwork intended for a children’s toy, the designers were simply thinking that no one would notice any inaccuracies. Looks great, though!

(Source: japanese forms/Flickr)

Historical Map: (1985?) London Tube Map

This map has certainly seen better days! The fact that the Hammersmith & City (salmon pink) line is not shown dates this map prior to 1990: the “peak hour only” dashed line on the very light purple Metropolitan Line, combined with the black text for station names leads me to believe that this is the 1985 map. By 1987, the Metropolitan Line had become a much darker colour, and station labels were the now-familiar blue.

(Back in) Time Tunnel

I love it when people find old transit maps still in situ at stations. This Northern Line map at Embankment dates from sometime prior to 1999 (the year that the Jubilee Line platforms at Charing Cross closed), but is still in place today — this photo was taken on February 21, 2013.

Note also the beautiful 1914 green glazed tiles next to the map.

(Source: stavioni/Flickr)

Brussels Metro Line Map and Next Train Countdown

A companion piece to the official map (Dec. 2012, 3 stars) on the platform at Rogier station. The look of this map marries with the official map quite well, showing an admirable consistency in application.

Rogier station itself is clearly shown with a nice big arrow and stations before it on the lines are clearly indicated against greyed-out route lines. There’s also a nicely legible countdown for the next two trains, indicating their route number (2 or 6), final destination and estimated time in minutes to arrival. It even looks like the position of all the trains on the line headed in the same direction are shown on the strip map as bright red lights. Now you can see where that train you just missed has got to without you!

The only thing this map fails to show is the circular nature of the routes that the station serves. Routes 2 and 6 form Brussels’ “circle line”, and the two terminus stations for Route 2 — Simonis (Elisabeth) and Simonis (Leopold II) — are really just two different levels of the same Metro station.

(Source: Ian YVR/Flickr)

The Almost Official Map: Ilya Birman’s Moscow Metro Map

I’ve seen a lot of tweets recently linking to the design process page for Art Lebedev’s new official Moscow Metro map (Transit Maps wrote about this page way back on February 4th).

However, I haven’t seen as much attention being paid to the second-place winning map, designed by Ilya Birman. He also has a design process page for his map, and it’s just as fascinating as the Lebedev one.

He discusses the difficulty of having to label the map in Cyrillic and Latin scripts, as well as the problems posed by stations having multiple names, depending which line they are on.

The map also employs an unusual station-finding technique that relates all stations to the Circle Line, rather than the more usual grid look-up. It seems a little quirky at first, but it’s actually surprisingly intuitive after a while.

The page also addresses important issues like colour-blindness (the map holds up fairly well) and what to do when a station named Aeroport no longer has an airport anywhere near it.

Well worth a look, if only to see the sheer amount of thought and effort that goes into making a transit map of this quality. For me, there’s very little between this map and the Lebedev map, and both would have been very worthy of being the public face of this venerable Metro system.