Urban rail transit in the United States: a multi-part project

[Ares96]

So a while ago I decided to move away from my usual beat of mapping historical elections and move over to mapping historical transit networks, with a focus on the US because so many of their cities tore up their networks completely in the 1950s and 60s. As a starting point for this, I thought I'd do the granddaddy of them all: Chicago, which in addition to its famous 'L' trains boasted the largest streetcar network in the world by track mileage - the figure I've seen is 1,600 miles of track, which I'm pretty sure counts double-tracked lines twice - even so, it'd be five times the size of current world leader Melbourne. The map I've begun to make shows the network on October 1st, 1947, the day the 'L' and the streetcar system were brought under a common, publicly-owned operator in the form of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), which is still with us today and still operates the 'L' and buses.

I'm drawing off two main sources for Chicago: firstly, Gábor Sándi's GS Tram Site, whose Chicago map provided the first impetus to work on this and remains a good overview source for what lines ran where, and secondly, the Illinois Railway Museum's online CTA history collection, which provided both more official maps that indicated several errors with the former source, and route books that list the exact alignments of all the lines and save me a lot of second-guessing where the maps are unclear. The only thing I'm doing off-hand are the stops, which I'm basing on the locations of modern-day bus stops and a degree of conjecture for those streets that no longer even have bus service.

The current WIP, attached below, should be complete for the Loop (the city centre, so named for the 'L' tracks that run in a loop around it) as well as the North Side, i.e. everything north and east of the Chicago River, with most of the lines in place for the Northwest Side, i.e. points west of the river and north of Division Street. It's already quite big, as you can plainly tell, and I imagine this is about a fifth of the size it's going to end up being.



EDIT: And just to state the obvious, the key isn't nearly complete either even if it looks finished.

[eepjr24]

Probably preaching to the choir, but some links you might find useful:

https://clearinghouse.isgs.illinois....al-photography

https://luna.lib.uchicago.edu/luna/s...tif&mi=0&trs=1

And for stations, you might be able to use the 1953 data? If so, click Chicago and then select the suburb for detailed maps with stations.

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/40.01/-100.06

- E

[Ares96]

And for stations, you might be able to use the 1953 data? If so, click Chicago and then select the suburb for detailed maps with stations.

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/40.01/-100.06

- E

I'm not seeing stops of any kind on those? Maybe I'm missing something, but the 1953 map doesn't even seem to show where the few remaining lines were. The 1939 one shows the lines as arrows in the street, but no stops - unless those are the stops (and there are multiple ones per block, so I seriously doubt that), in which case this map would need to be even bigger.

[eepjr24]

I'm not seeing stops of any kind on those? Maybe I'm missing something, but the 1953 map doesn't even seem to show where the few remaining lines were. The 1939 one shows the lines as arrows in the street, but no stops - unless those are the stops (and there are multiple ones per block, so I seriously doubt that), in which case this map would need to be even bigger.

Sorry, I may have misunderstood what you needed. I was looking at Calumet and saw Thornton Junction there and thought that was the kind of location data you were looking for.



- E

[Ares96]

Sorry, I may have misunderstood what you needed. I was looking at Calumet and saw Thornton Junction there and thought that was the kind of location data you were looking for.



- E

Ah, no it's not. Thanks anyway.

[eepjr24]

Mea Culpa.

This might be a decent reference?

And here is a decent map of the streetcar routes from 1937?

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[Ares96]

Another WIP. This should basically be the entire West Side network, with the obvious caveat that I haven't gotten around to the stops on more than about a third of the lines. As for the rest, I'm sorry to say my computer's starting to crack under the strain - PDN can't make the canvas any bigger without running out of RAM. I've tried to solve it by merging some branch lines, and I may start to merge the layers for lines that don't intersect. If that all fails, I may end up doing the South Side as a separate file and then paste them together in the PNG version. Or I might buy some new RAM, or just give up altogether. Don't say you haven't been warned.

[eepjr24]

Very nice. Starting to look like a multilayer circuit board at the busier spots, but still very clear to read.

- E

[Ares96]

I do think the Loop got a lot more readable when I cleared out the X lines.

[Ares96]

Hi again! Sorry about the lack of updates for a while, but I eventually just found the Chicago map got too big to edit on my computer. Bit of a shame, but what can you do.

So instead, I thought I'd try my hand at the American city that is arguably Chicago's antithesis: Boston. Old, established, compact, and with a very confusing street grid, all of which are factors that make Boston very fun to map. It also took a very different attitude to transit planning from Chicago: where most American cities either had a streetcar company and a rapid transit company that didn't interface at all (which was Chicago's situation) or a streetcar company that built its own rapid transit lines over time while remaining primarily a streetcar company (which was the case in, say, Philadelphia), Boston had a strong rapid transit company - the Boston Elevated Railway, or BERy for short - that took over the streetcar lines and reshaped the network to serve the rapid transit lines. This resulted in a network layout that was, in some ways, ahead of its time - the BERy had made a priority of getting streetcar lines off the streets in the downtown area, which was mostly achieved by the 1920s, and instead lines were grouped into one of two broad categories:
- Lines serving Back Bay and points west, as well as the 43 (Columbus Ave) and 9 (City Point via Broadway) lines and the two lines serving Charlestown in the north, were bundled into the Tremont Street Subway, America's oldest underground rail line, which had a total of nine lines serving parts or all of it. Over time, all but three of these lines would be abandoned (with one new one added), and these now form the branches of the MBTA Green Line.
- The remaining lines were bundled at rapid transit stations, serving shorter routes that connected one suburb or major road corridor to its nearest station, at which passengers would then transfer to go downtown. These lines are all gone, apart from the 28 (Mattapan High Speed), which is still operated with 1940s-era PCC streetcars and treated as an extension of the Red Line.

By 1947, when the BERy was nationalised and made the core of the new Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the streetcar system was already in decline, several lines having been replaced with easier-to-maintain trolleybuses. I plan to show those lines on the map, and as we move north there's going to be quite a few of them. Notably, some of the streetcar lines that were bundled into the tunnel at Harvard Square still survive in trolleybus form today, Boston being one of five American cities that maintain trolleybus networks.

A note regarding the subways: the four rapid transit lines are coloured as per the current MBTA colour scheme. This is technically anachronistic, as those colours were only introduced in the 1960s. At the time, the three all-RT lines were referred to by the numbers 1 (Red), 2 (Orange) and 3 (Blue), while the future Green Line didn't have a number beyond those of the streetcar lines that served it. I've marked the period line numbers at the termini, and really, I don't suppose the colours are any worse than any other set as long as I'm going to separate them at all.



EDIT: Oh, and as with the Chicago map, a lot of the stop locations and names here are conjectural, based on the stopping patterns of currently-existing bus lines following the same streets.