I'm finally publishing one of last year's projects - a new take on the famous London Underground map.
I've always been fascinated by the hidden complexity of the Underground, and armed with a couple of different sources, I set out to make a non-geographical map of the Underground's track and platform layout (unlike, for example, the excellent carto.metro geographical map) of the lines:
The first step was, naturally, to write a program which would automatically draw the map for me. Not completely automatically, of course - it still takes inputs of where the platforms and points are, but it takes care of drawing nice, neat lines, with 45° angles, correctly rounded corners, and a few other visual flourishes that would take hours to apply manually.
While the first version of the program read entirely from a text file, it wasn't long before it became apparent that moving any more than a few stations around was going to be a massive pain, and so I quickly wrote a GUI tool to edit the stations (and to draw the map in realtime as I did so). Thanks to my use of Cairo for the PDF output, it was trivial to embed the map code into a GTK program:
With the help of Martin Smith, I sat down and encoded every single station and line join on the Underground, Overground and DLR, as well as any points which were roughly part of the main running lines (depots are excluded from the map for space reasons).
Once they were all in, there was then many hours of shuffling and moving the stations around, changing their orientations, and getting the labels in the right places - the goal being to have the entire system fit reasonably in an A4-shaped area (a task that's much more difficult than it sounds). Along the way, I've broken many laws of geography, but the tracks are mostly correct relative to each other, an improvement over the original Tube map (which is readable at a much greater distance than mine - there's a reason it's so contorted and lies about where things actually are).
Unfortunately, I never got around to publishing this last year, but I've polished and released it now, in preparation for another (very much related) project of mine I want to get out at some point soon. There's also potential for this map to be combined with the live Tube position data (and something similar ripped from the less-detailed DLR and Overground departure boards), if I ever find the time!
If you want a PDF download, or some more details and notes on how to send me corrections, visit the project page. Code is available in a repo on GitHub.
Comments
Luke
Looks cool, but in the many hundreds of journeys on the Euston-Watford Junction overground train, it's only ever stopped at 1 of two platforms at Euston. All but one of those times it was platform 9, and that one other time it was platform 10.
Ben Weiner
I’m pondering the fact that tube stations (as opposed to sub-surface ones) sometimes have platforms stacked one above the other. Is that beyond the remit of this work, or can we look forward to a 3d version of the diagram soon?
Andrew Godwin
Luke: That's the sort of data you just don't get in the track diagrams. I'm tempted to leave it like it is, though, since it's possible for the line to go elsewhere - then again, it's possible for a lot of the lines to go to a lot of places.
Ben: I'm very aware of that, and that's beyond the remit of this work, unfortunately. However, I have something in the works that will help with that.
Danny Howard
Absolutely neat!! I wuold like to take a stab at your code to see if it might help in maintaining stuff like my "San Jose 'Tube Map'" which is our local highways done in the style of Beck's tube map. :)
http://dannyman.toldme.com/2011/08/10/san-jose-tube-map/
I dabble in Python but so far my mapmaking has been to sketch ideas out of paper, calculate station spacings, then spend several hours in Inkscape, painstakingly moving things around and applying curves.
I'm going to link my page to this one as a reference for future hacking. :)
Thanks and best wishes!
-danny
Sophie
Beautiful, beautiful work, well done! As a London lover and tube geek, I have a feeling I may be putting this up on the wall :-) Small niggle though, you have mis-spelt Tufnell Park. Other than that I think it's wonderful. I used to live across the road from South Kentish Town which, like York Road, is still recognizable above ground as an Underground station building.
Michael Haslam
There's one London Overground train per day from Barking that terminates at Hampstead Heath. Should that bit of track be shown?
Great piece of work, sir.
Arun M
Brilliant!! I am tube lover and have always been fascinated with tube related information - distances, crossings, interchanges etc. This map is really fun to go through and hope to see more from you in the future. All the best with your current project too.