Isochrone Tokyo

Tokyo has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the world. Curtis Fenner has built an isochrone map that allows you to see where you can travel in the city by train in a given time.

The purpose of the map is to help people make crucial decisions about where to live by visualizing real-world commute times. It effectively achieves this by not only showing the reach of the entire network but also highlighting areas that are surprisingly difficult to get to, revealing what Curtis calls "train deserts" -pockets in the city that are more than a ten-minute walk from a station.

Users can input a single destination into the map How Far Can Trains Take Me in Tokyo? to see all the areas reachable within a specified commute time. The map also has a feature that allows for the addition of multiple destinations. When more than one destination is entered, the map blends the travel times, which can be useful for planning a meeting spot or finding a place to live that optimizes the commutes for multiple people. The settings panel also allows users to adjust the maximum door-to-door commute time and the maximum walk time to a station.

Tokyo has around 100 different transit lines and more than a dozen different train operators. These private operators typically do not publish their schedules in an easily usable format, which means most maps simply can't account for them. This map, however, tackles this challenge head-on by using a combination of web scraping and estimation to fill in the data gaps, resulting in a more complete travel time map of the city.

If you are interested in exploring an isochrone map of your city then you might find one under the Maps Mania isochrone tag.

🙂 The Emoji Map of Train Delays ☹️

In the classic 1990s management console game Theme Park, visitors’ satisfaction levels were shown through the use of small expressive icons - 🙂☹️. A similar visual cue has been used in Bloomberg's new mapped visualization of train delays on the New Jersey Transit commuter rail service.

In NJ Transit Is NYC’s Least Reliable Commuter Rail — By a Long Shot Bloomberg has mapped a series of smiley-face emojis onto a New Jersey Transit map. Happy, sweating, and sad emojis are used to represent trains that are on time, 10-30 minutes late, and more than 30 minutes late, respectively. The use of expressive smiley emojis on an animated transit map vividly illustrates the levels of delays on different lines during a particularly bad evening commute.

Bloomberg tracked more than 190,000 trains using real-time transit feed data from May through July 2025 to determine that NJ Transit passengers experienced major service disruptions at six times the rate of other commuters on its New York and Connecticut counterparts. The data revealed that there are frequent delays of 15 minutes or more, cancellations, and particularly long delays of 30 minutes or more on NJ Transit trains.

By translating raw delay data into an immediately understandable visual language, Bloomberg’s mapped emoji visualization makes the scale and severity of NJ Transit’s service disruptions as clear as a smiley or sad face emoji.

Live London Underground Trains

Live maps displaying the movements of planes, trains, and automobiles have been among my favorite mash-ups over the years, so it seems fitting to launch the third decade of Maps Mania with a beautiful illustration of a live, real-time transit map.

The Live Tube Map is a fully interactive, real-time 3D map that lets you watch underground trains move across London as they shuttle through tunnels, stations, and lines. It’s like the classic Tube map - but alive. Built by Ben James, the Live Tube Map uses real-time data from Transport for London (TfL) to visualize each train’s location, progress, and route. Each moving colored line you see gliding across the screen is a real train, updated in near real-time and placed on a highly stylized 3D map of London.

The choice of using moving colored polylines with transparent tails gives the map a beautiful and mesmeric aesthetic (although I think the blocky trains used by Mini Tokyo 3D are hard to beat). 

Under the hood, the map is powered by:

• MapLibre GL for rendering a high-performance, interactive map in WebGL
• TfL’s live feed to gather real-time train movements and trip plans
• MapTiler map tiles with 3D buildings

Hovering over a train on the map reveals a clean tooltip: line name, current status, journey progress (with a neat progress bar), and even upcoming stations. Beyond the sheer visual appeal, the Live Tube Map is a fascinating demo of what’s possible when you mix open data with open-source tech. It transforms a complex network of live infrastructure into something playful, transparent, and informative. 

It shows you moving trains on a map in real-time!

The Best (and Worst) Cities for Rail Transport

London & New York - population density and railways

The citizens of Hong Kong have the best rail transport system in the world according to a new study by the University of Toronto. Osaka, Japan, and Madrid, Spain, rank second and third, respectively, while New York ranks highest among U.S. cities.

The University of Toronto's School of Cities analyzed how well the world's 250 most populated cities provide rail transit for their residents. The ranking is based on the percentage of each city's population that lives within 1 km of a rail station. In essence, the study measures how many people have convenient access to rail transit.

You can view the result for yourself on the University's Rail Transit & Population Density website. The interactive visualization allows you to compare maps of any two cities and see what percentage of their populations have easy access to rail. Each city's map displays population density overlaid on its rail network, with a breakdown beneath showing the share of residents living within 1 km of a major rail station.

The School of Cities highlights two main limitations in their analysis. The rankings focus solely on rail transit, excluding other public transportation systems that may offer comparable service, such as bus networks. Additionally, they do not account for service frequency, a key factor in the overall effectiveness of transit systems.

Via: Data Vis Dispatch

Roads, Railways, Runways & Rivers

I have been inspired by OpenSkiStats' Which Way do You Ski to create my own interactive map for visualizing the orientations of roads, railways, runways, and rivers in towns and cities around the world.

In Which Way Do You Ski, OpenSkiStats created a series of "compass rose" visualizations that illustrate the strong poleward tendency of ski runs across the globe. These ski slope orientation visualizations reminded me of Geoff Boeing's Comparing City Street Orientations which uses compass roses to show the orientations of city street grids around the world.

Geoff Boeing's Comparing City Street Orientations

Inspired by Geoff's visualizations Volodymyr Agafonkin created his Road Orientations Map, a Mapbox-powered map that lets users view the street grid orientations of any town or city worldwide. Using Volodymyr's code, I’ve now developed my own Transportation Orientations Map.

My Transportation Orientations interactive map allows you to view the orientations of roads, railways, rivers, and runways anywhere in the world. It provides an intuitive way to observe and analyze how these features are oriented within any area you choose.

Key Features:

1. Dynamic Compass Rose - The compass rose updates in real-time as you move around the map or zoom in and out. It reflects the orientations of the selected feature set in the visible map area.
2. Interactive Geocoding - Quickly locate any place in the world using the integrated search bar powered by OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim API.
3. Customizable Layers - focus on specific infrastructure types by selecting from roads, railways, runways, or rivers. The selected features are highlighted on the map in red, and their orientations are reflected in the compass rose.
4. Downloadable Visualizations - Add a personal touch by entering custom text below the compass rose. Once satisfied, you can download the compass rose visualization as a PNG image with a single click.

My map is largely a clone of Volodymyr's original Road Orientations Map. All I've done is adapt it for MapLibre, add the ability to view the orientations of railways, runways, and rivers, and include an option to download the compass rose as an image.

North America's Shrinking Railways

Passenger rail services in 1980 and 2024 interactive map visualizes the Amtrak (red) and VIA Rail (blue) systems in 1980 and 2024, alongside independent railways and commuter services (green). The map highlights a notable decline in the availability of passenger rail services in both the USA and Canada over the last 44 years.

Using the map's slide control, you can easily switch between the rail services available in 1980 and those in 2024. This quick comparison starkly illustrates the reduction in passenger rail services in both countries. Additionally, the 1980 map includes notable routes (in grey) that were discontinued after 1976, revealing an even more dramatic decline when comparing the situation today to earlier years.

Canada: Passenger Rail Decline

In Canada, VIA Rail’s 2024 service levels have significantly decreased compared to 1980, especially in terms of the number of routes and trains available outside the core Quebec City-Windsor Corridor. The focus has shifted toward fewer but higher-quality services in high-demand areas, often at the expense of rural and remote connectivity.

USA: Amtrak’s Reduced Long-Distance Services

In the USA, Amtrak’s long-distance services are less frequent in 2024 than in 1980, with several routes entirely discontinued. The 1980 map also shows numerous additional routes (in grey) that were abandoned between 1976 and 1980. 

For a broader perspective, Vox’s animated map - the decline of passenger railway services in the US - illustrates the steady erosion of American rail since 1962. 

Freight vs. Passenger Rail in North America

It's important to recognize that while passenger rail has declined, the USA still possesses an extensive rail network. This is clearly shown on the National Rail Network map of Canada, the USA, and Mexico. However, this vast network is predominantly used for freight transportation rather than passenger rail.

The United States actually has one of the largest rail networks in the world, but freight railroads account for approximately 140,000 miles of track, while Amtrak operates on around 21,000 miles, most of which it does not own. Instead, Amtrak relies on agreements with freight railroads to use their tracks, often resulting in delays because freight trains are given priority.

Global Rail Network Comparisons

For a deeper comparison of the U.S. rail network with those of other countries, you can refer to OpenRailwayMap. This resource uses OpenStreetMap data to create a worldwide, open, up-to-date, and detailed map of global rail networks.

Mapping the Underground Art Scene

Earlier this month Maps Mania reviewed Subway Stories, a visualization of subway journeys on the NYC subway system. The map was developed for the 2024 MTA Open Data Challenge.  Now, the MTA has announced the winner of that challenge: Art Off the Rails, an interactive map showcasing the artworks of the MTA.

Art Off the Rails uses the MTA's extensive art catalog to map the locations of artworks in New York's subway, Metro-North, and Long Island Rail Road stations. This innovative tool turns your daily commute into a cultural journey by highlighting the incredible variety of public art across the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) system.

The New York subway system is home to hundreds of stunning works of art. From intricate mosaics to striking sculptures, these pieces enrich commuters’ daily journeys underground. With Art Off the Rails, commuters can delve into the history, artists, and stories behind each MTA art installation.

Stations with artworks are marked on the map as white circles, with the size of the circle indicating the number of artworks at that location. This feature makes it easy to explore the artistic highlights along your subway route. From the beloved Alice in Wonderland-themed mosaics at the 50th Street station to Roy Lichtenstein's Times Square mural and the abstract glass installations at Fulton Center, the MTA subway is filled with fascinating works of art. Now, with the Art Off the Rails interactive map, you can uncover and appreciate these artistic gems.

The London Underground's Art on the Underground map is a little more analog. While there isn’t yet an interactive map for the artworks on the Tube, the Art on the Underground website offers a free downloadable PDF Art Map. This printable guide (a snippet of which is shown above) uses the iconic Harry Beck-inspired schematic layout of the London Underground system.

On this map, numbers indicate the locations of artworks across the Tube network. A key provides details about each numbered artwork, including its title, artist, and precise station location. The London Underground map features works by notable artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi, Mark Wallinger, and Clare Woods.

NYC's Subway Stories

New York City's subway network is a bustling artery that connects millions of New Yorkers to their daily lives. A new interactive map, Subway Stories, developed for the 2024 MTA Open Data Challenge, visualizes some of the stories and patterns that emerge from the rich flow of New York's subway ridership data. Drawing on comprehensive data from 2023, the visualization provides an unprecedented look at how the subway system functions as the lifeblood of the city, ferrying nearly four million passengers every day. 

The map is built on the MTA's Subway Origin-Destination Ridership dataset, a detailed collection of estimates that track the journeys of millions of riders. Although the MTA cannot directly record where each person exits, they use sophisticated algorithms to infer destinations based on where commuters start their next trip. This approach captures the complex network of journeys throughout the city, revealing the ways neighborhoods, work schedules, and events shape the daily rhythms of the subway system. By visualizing this information, Subway Stories paints a detailed portrait of New York's commuters, from the early morning rush of suburban workers pouring into Midtown to the late-night rides of performers and night-shift workers.

At the heart of the map are five stories: Fans at Flushing Meadows, A Tale of Five Chinatowns, Nightlife Along the L Train, The Weekend Shift, and How New York City Works. Each story looks at a subsection of the MTA data to reveal the unique rhythms and distinct communities that make New York's subway system so vibrant. From the surge of sports fans flocking to Flushing Meadows during the US Open, to the bustling activity of the city's diverse Chinatown neighborhoods, the narratives explore how different events, cultures, and industries shape the daily flow of commuters. Whether it’s the nightlife crowd hopping on the L train or essential workers heading to their weekend shifts, each story offers a glimpse into the heartbeat of the city, painting a detailed picture of how millions of people move through and interact with the subway system every day.

There are eight million stories in the naked city; these are only five of them. The map's creators are keen to learn if you also have a story to tell using the MTA's subway ridership data. If so - there is a short form that you can complete to share your story on the Subway Stories map.

If you are interested in creating your own scrollytelling data story then you might want to explore Mapbox's Interactive Storytelling: A low-code template to help you tell your map-based story. Alternatively you can start with Maplibre's Fly to a location based on scroll position demo map.

The Car Free Cities Atlas

The cyclists of Helsinki have the best access to protected bike lanes of any citizens in the world. 94% of people in the city live within 300m of a protected bikeway. This means that Helsinki scores number one out of the 1095 cities ranked in the Atlas of Sustainable City Transport.

The new Atlas of Sustainable City Transport ranks and maps cities around the world based on how easy residents can access public transit, protected bike lanes and car-free places. The map allows you to explore the sustainable transport options in over 1,000 cities around the world.

The Atlas provides a global data dashboard that shows how cities are performing in terms of sustainable transportation by tracking nine indicators. These indicators focus on factors such as how close people live to sustainable transportation options like bike lanes and public transit and how many people have access to essential services without needing a car.

Using the map it is possible to select from 1095 cities around the world and explore how each individual city performs under each of the nine sustainable city transport indicators. The map also provides a ranking for each city under each of the nine indicators allowing you to see which cities around the world have the best and worst sustainable transport options.

The residents of Minneapolis have the best access to protected bike lanes in the United States. In Minneapolis 40% of people live within 300m of a protected bikeway. It is a long way short of the 94% in Helsinki but is way better than the situation facing the residents of Bakersfield, Louisville and the five other U.S. cities where 0 citizens live within 300m of a protected bikeway.

24 cities in the United States have no rapid transit infrastructure. The best performing city in terms of access to rapid transit is New York, where 43% of residents 'live within 1km of high-capacity public transport running on a dedicated right-of-way.' Even that doesn't quite live up to Leipzig, where 75% of residents live within 1km of public transport.

Mapping the History of the Railway

Martin Brake has created a number of interactive maps which visualize the historical development of transport networks in Germany, London, Paris and Barcelona. His Timemap Timelines project provides an animated map for each featured city which shows how its transit network has grown over time. For example the screenshot above shows the development of the London Underground between 1858 and 1947.

Using the timeline control on each map you can navigate to any year to view a map of the city's transit network at that point in history (including trains, trams, lightrail, subways and funiculars). As well as the individual city maps Timemap Timelines includes an animated map which shows the development of the whole rail German network over time.

Martin warns that 'all the data is not correct'. I found out while creating my own animated map The First 50 Years of the London Undergound that it isn't always easy to determine the exact dates of when individual transit lines were opened and that different historical sources might give different dates. For my map of the history of the London Tube I relied heavily on Wikipedia. I have had to make several revisions to the map since its first publication thanks to a number of keen eyed observers spotting errors in the dates. I suspect that my map is still not 100% accurate.

You can view animated maps of other rail networks being constructed around the world on the amazing Citylines. Citylines is a collaborative platform which is busy mapping the public transit systems of the world. Using Citylines you can explore interactive maps visualizing the local transit systems of hundreds of cities around the globe. You can also use Citylines to explore how each city's public transport network has grown over time. 

My favorite feature of Citylines is the ability to view a city's transit network developing through time. Each city's transit system map includes a date control, which allows you to view the extent of the local transit network for any year in history. Press the play button on the map and you can view an animated map showing how the city's transit system has developed through history. 

Via: WeeklyOSM

Not Everyone Commutes by Car

In Canada and the United States 95% of journeys to and from work are made by car. Elsewhere in the world people often walk, cycle or use public transport in order to get to work.

Cities Moving is a research project by the Complexity Science Hub of the University of Vienna, which analysed the mode of transport most commonly used for commuting to work in 794 cities in 61 countries around the world. The study categorized commuting journeys using three different modes of transport: Active Mobility (eg walking and cycling), Bus or Public Transport, and Cars.

Even outside the US it would be wrong to suggest that the car isn't often the most used mode of transport for traveling to work. However as you can see from the graphs below comparing the modes of transport used in US cities compared to the rest of the world there is far more use of public transport (shown in blue) and active mobility (yellow) outside of America.

The study's published paper Large cities are less efficient for sustainable transport: The ABC of mobility concludes that outside of the US city size has a significant impact on the mode of transport chosen for work. The longer commuting distances often associated with larger cities make active mobility (walking and cycling) less popular, and the study found that in larger cities there is an increased use of public transport.

Via: Quantum of Sollazzo

The Year of the Map Game

I've said it before but 2024 is the Year of the Map Game.

Every day of 2024 a new map game is released*. Today's game is Metrodle, a fun daily challenge to identify a station on the London Underground map.

Every day Metrodle shows you an unlabeled station on a map of the London Underground. Your task is to simply name the mapped station based on your microscopic knowledge of the London tube. You have six attempts to name the correct station and will receive clues after each unsuccessful guess.

After each incorrect guess you are informed how many stations you are away from the correct answer and in which direction you need to travel. If you know all 272 stations on the London Underground like the back of your hand then you will have no problem in identifying the correct station from the clues provided. If your knowledge of the London Underground is a little more limited then you can always cheat by consulting the official London Underground map.

If you are a fan of London Tube games then you are in luck. Metrodle follows in the footsteps of the hugely popular London Tube Memory Game and my own hugely unpopular Tubebusters game.

If daily game challenges are your thing then you might prefer Travle (a daily challenge to connect locations on a map) or any of the games featured in the post The 10 Best Wordle Like Map Games.

* - Past performance is no guarantee of future results

Subway Specs - Part III

Tokyo's Shinjuku Station is the world's busiest train station. Its is used by over 3.5 million passengers every day. To cope with that amount of traffic the station has to be very big. It has 35 platforms, while another 17 platforms can be accessed through hallways to 5 directly connected stations without traveling outside.

With over 35 platforms and over 200 station exits it can be easy to get lost in Shinjuku Station. If you need a little help finding your way then Shinjuku Station Indoor, an impressive new 3D map of the station (created using three.js), may be of some help.

You may also enjoy Tomoyuki Tanaka's truly impressive blueprint plan of Shinjuku Station.

If you are a fan of 3D plans of train stations then you will probably love the work of Albert Guillaumes Marcer, who is single-handedly mapping the subway stations of the world. So far his Stations and Transfers website features well over 800 3D maps of subway stations in cities all over the globe.

Also See

X-Ray Area Maps - New York architect Candy Chan's 3D plans of New York subway stations

Ian Visits - Transport for London's axonometric diagrams for 120 London Underground stations.

The Mapped History of the London Tube

In the 19th century, London was a city grappling with rapid population growth. The idea of an underground railway was conceived as a solution to the city's ever-growing traffic congestion. and to help improve travel efficiency.

In 1863, the world's first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, opened its doors. Powered by steam locomotives, the Metropolitan Railway connected Paddington and Farringdon, providing a lifeline for commuters and transforming the way Londoners moved through the city. 

My interactive map, the 19th Century Tube, tells the story of the building of the world's first underground railway in London during the second half of the 19th Century. Press the map's 'play' button and you can follow the construction of the London tube year-by-year from 1860 to the end of the 19th Century. You can also click on any of the underground station markers on the map to learn more about when each station was opened and which London Underground lines that they currently serve. 

I think this may have been the first interactive map I've made without the help of Stack Overflow. Instead, as an experiment, when I needed help I referred to Google's Bard AI. For example I asked Bard to provide the JavaScript and CSS style for the map's slide control. Bard's code works perfectly (although I'm not entirely sure about its design choices and may update how the slide control looks at some point in the future).

If you are interested in exploring the code of 19th Century Tube, or if you want to re-use the code to create your own historical transit map then you can clone 19th Century Tube on its Glitch Page.

Night Train to Europe

Last night at 8.18pm the night train to Paris left Berlin Central Station. It was the first Berlin-Paris night train in over 9 years. The new Nightjet service between the German and French capitals is yet more evidence of the resurgence of overnight rail travel in Europe. 

At the beginning of the 21st Century night train services in Europe were being closed at an alarming rate, thanks largely to the competition from budget air travel. Thankfully European governments and travelers have been keen to support greener modes of travel and there has been a concerted effort to re-open night-rail connections between a number of European cities. 

If you fancy catching a romantic sleeper train then you can refer to the Good Morning Europe, Night Train Map to discover which night train routes are currently in operation across Europe. Büro des Präsidenten's interactive map is based on their own renowned night train poster of Europe. Major cities on this map are marked with numbered night train routes. If you hover over these numbers on the interactive map then the selected route is highlighted on the map, allowing you to quickly see where you can travel to in Europe by sleeper train from that city.

Unfortunately the Berlin-Paris night train is so new that this route has not yet been added to the map. It also doesn't seem to have been added to Night Trains' Night-Train Map. Night Train's map is essentially a static image with panning and zooming options. This means that the map can be a little hard to navigate. If you want to see which night train services run from a city it might actually be easier to just select the city from the menu above the Night-Train map.

The Live Amtrak Train Map

Trains.fyi is a live interactive map which shows the real-time locations of passenger trains in the U.S. and Canada. 

The map uses colored markers to show the near real-time positions of trains from a number of different train companies in North America. The arrow on the markers show a train's direction of travel and the colors indicate the transit operators of individual trains. If you click on a marker on the map you can discover the selected train's name, which stations it is traveling to & from, and its current speed.

The map includes Amtrak trains in the U.S., VIA Rail Trains in Canada and the locations of trains from a number of other transit providers. Unfortunately the map is missing a number of regional train operators. Reading the comments on this Hacker News thread it appears that the map's creator is actively working on adding the live train location feeds for a number of these missing transit operators.

   

The Amtrak/VIA Live Map also shows the live position of Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada trains. It uses live data from Amtrak's Track-A-Train service and VIA's status service to estimate the real-time location of U.S. and Canadian trains and their current running status.

The location of individual trains is shown on the map with colored numbers. The colors on this map indicate the on-time performance of the train at the last station. In other words a train's color on the map provides a guide to how late a train is running. If you click on a train on the map then you can view how many minutes (if any) it is running late and its current estimated speed.

The map sidebar shows a selected train's complete schedule, including all the stations on its route. This schedule shows how many minutes late (if any) the train departed each and every station already visited and how many minutes late it is expected to arrive at all remaining stations on its route.

You can also track trains in real-time on the official Amtrak Track Your Train Map. Enter a train number, or name into Amtrak's map and you can view its progress in real-time. Click on a train's marker on the map and you can view its current speed, its estimated time of arrival at its next station and how minutes early or late it is running.

If you enjoy live real-time transit maps then you might also enjoy:

If you are a fan of live real-time maps of train networks then you might also like:

geOps - animated maps of over 700 transit systems around the world

Train Map - a live map of the Belgium rail network

Swiss Railways Network - the original real-time map of Swiss trains

Mini Tokyo 3D - a live real-time map of Tokyo's public transit system (in 3D)

Zugverfolgung - real-time train tracking in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands

Signalbox - a live train map of the UK

You will also find many more live transit maps by checking out the real-time tag on Maps Mania.

The Rise & Fall of National Rail Networks

The Berliner-Morgenpost has visualized the rise and fall of the German rail network from its rapid growth in the 19th Century right up to its 21st Century post-privatization contraction. The German Rail Network from 1835 Until Today uses an interactive map to show all the active rail lines in Germany for every single year from 1835 until 2022.

On December the 7th 1835 a six-kilometer rail line from Nuremberg to Fürth was opened. On which a steam locomotive, the Adler, would carry passengers at the dizzying speed of 28 kph. Things then sped-up rather quickly and by 1870 Germany had constructed around 14,000 kilometers of railway lines. In fact the German railway became so large that in the 1920s the nationalized German rail company, the Deutsche Reichsbahn was the largest employer in the world.

In West Germany the national rail network began to suffer from the 1950s as a consequence of the rise in car ownership. However the biggest contraction in the German rail network began in the 1990s. After the reunification of Germany the newly privatized rail lines in the former East Germany were forced to close unprofitable lines and stations. The result is that the German rail network now has around 39,900 km of lines, down from the 52,900 km of rail-lines it had from 1940-1970.

Irish Railway Stations 1834-2000 is a simple interactive map which plots every active Irish train station in operation for every year from 1834 to 2000. By scrolling through all 166 years on the map you get a great overview of the rise and fall of the railway in Ireland since 1834.

The first railway line opened in Ireland was the Dublin and Kingstown Railway (D&KR), which ran between Westland Row in Dublin and Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), a distance of 10 km (6 mi). It was opened on 17 December 1834. In 1839 a second railway line, the Ulster Railway, opened between Belfast Great Victoria Street and Lisburn. 

If you use the map's timeline to progress through the years from 1834 you can see how the railway spread across Ireland, largely emanating out from the initial lines built in Dublin and Belfast. For almost a century after 1834 the railway in Ireland continued to grow, reaching out to all parts of the island of Ireland. 

When you reach the late 1930's on the map you can begin to see railway stations disappearing off the map. The Great Depression and the rise of the motor car obviously had an effect of freight and passenger traffic resulting in the closure of a number of stations. In the 1950s and 1960s you can begin to see the closure of many branch lines on the map. This significant reduction in the rail network in Ireland means that even in the 21st Century the Irish rail network consists of only around 1,698 miles, or around half of the 3,480 miles of line that existed in the early 20th Century.

In August 1847 a railway line was opened connecting the Swiss cities of Baden and Zurich. 175 years later Switzerland's rail network is over 5,000 kilometers long. Back in 2022 the Swiss broadcaster SRF celebrated the 175th anniversary of the country's railway network by creating a Journey Through the History of Swiss Railways.  

SRF's history of the Swiss railway includes a map which shows the opening of new railway lines by year of construction. This map is accompanied by a graph which shows the length (in km) of railway lines opened in each year. From the animation of this map above you can see that the golden era of the Swiss railway was in its first one hundred years. Since the 1920s further extensions to the railway in Switzerland have been fairly sporadic. 

If you are interested in the history of your city's transit network then you should have a look at Citylines. Citylines is a collaborative platform which is busy mapping the public transit systems of the world. Using Citylines you can explore interactive maps visualizing the local transit systems of hundreds of cities around the globe. You can also use Citylines to explore how each city's public transport network has grown and contracted over time. 

Each city's transit system map includes a date control, which allows you to view the extent of the local transit network for any year in history. Press the play button on the map and you can view an animated map showing how the city's transit system has developed through history. 

All the data used on Citylines is open sourced under the Open Database License (ODbL). This means that if you want to create your own city public transit map then you can download the data for your map from Citylines (in json or CSV formats).

Redesigning the World's Transit Maps

The University of Freiburg has redesigned the transit maps of every city in the world. Zoom in on any location on the university's LOOM Global Transit Map and you can view the local transit network mapped using your choice of four different transit map projections.

In every city in the world you can view the local transit map in either a geographical, octilinear, geo-octilinear or orthoradial projection. The animated GIF above shows each of these four projections applied to the New York subway and lightrail network. 

The 'LOOM' in the map's title stands for 'Line-Ordering Optimized Maps'. LOOM is an algorithm developed by the University of Freiburg that takes the geographical data of a transit network and then maps it to minimize 'the total number of line crossings and line separations'. In this mapping LOOM respects the geography of the network so that the map created isn't just a schematic map of the transit network but works geographically as well. 

Because the transit maps generated by the University of Freiburg respect the geography of station locations the resulting transit maps can be used as overlays on interactive maps. The university has developed a set of map tiles which you can use to add these transit maps in your favorite mapping library. The Transit Vector Tile Service offers map tiles for tram, subway-lightrail, rail-commuter and long distance rail in the geographical, octilinear, geo-octilinear and orthoradial layouts. These maps are updated weekly with the latest OpenStreetMap data.

Via: Weekly OSM

How to Avoid a Train Wreck

A very simple chart designed by a French railway engineer in the 19th Century has helped save millions of lives. Charles Ibry's train schedule, originally developed to timetable and schedule trains on the Paris - Le Havre line, is an extremely effective tool for timetabling and visualizing train traffic on a railway line. Perhaps most importantly it provides railway companies with a powerful visual aid to avoid potential crashes between trains traveling on the same line.

Chemins de Fer de Paris à Rouen et au Havre is a small scrollytelling presentation of how Charles Ibry's chart for timetabling trains is used and how it helps to avoid train companies scheduling potential train wrecks. As you scroll through the presentation the map sidebar and image annotations provide a walk-through of Ibry's chart and explain how the chart is used by railway companies to schedule trains.

Chemins de Fer de Paris à Rouen et au Havre uses a IIIF image of Ibry's chart from the Bibliothèque nationale de France. I have been able to use this image with the Leaflet.js mapping library thanks to Jack Reed's Leaflet-IIIF plug-in. I created the annotations using my own Leaflet-IIIF-GeoJSON tool. The annotation arrows used in the presentation use Webkid's leaflet-swoopy plug-in.

The Chemins de Fer can also be viewed in detail on the Bibliothèque nationale de France website. If you are interested then you can also view a completed chart of the Paris to Boulogne line on the bibliothèque's website. 

Charles Ibry's timetabling graph is also discussed on Hannah Fry's BBC Podcast This Train has Been Delayed (Part of Hannah Fry's Uncharted series). This Train is Delayed discusses how Ibry's graph recently helped Singapore's transit network finally discover a glitch which was causing their driver-less trains to seemingly stop at random between stations (when they weren't meant to be stopping).

Tokyo Live

Tokyo Live is an amazing real-time animated map of the trains on Tokyo's rapid transit and metro networks. The map allows you to track and watch in real-time all of Tokyo's trains as they navigate and move around the city. All on top of an impressive 3D map of Tokyo.

I can't help thinking that Tokyo Live was probably inspired by the equally impressive Mini Tokyo 3D, which is a 3D animated map of Tokyo's overground and underground transit networks. One of the main differences between the two maps is that Tokyo Live uses 3D train models rather than the stylized colored blocks used by Mini Tokyo 3D.

Mini Tokyo 3D

Tokyo Live includes a drop-down menu which allows you to select any Tokyo transit line. This opens a single line map of the line's stations with all the trains shown moving along the line. You can select any station on this line to center the main 3D map on the chosen station. You can also click on any of the individual trains to center the map on that train and to track its movement in real-time around Tokyo.

Tokyo Live works by using train timetables from the Public Transportation Open Data Center for Tokyo Metro coupled with real-time transit feeds. The 3D building data on the map uses the scene layer of Tokyo buildings from Esri Japan.

If you are impressed by Tokyo Live and Mini Tokyo 3D then you should also have a look at some of the other live subway maps listed in the post The Best Real-Time Subway Maps.