Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
Click on the links below to access scans of some of the late 19th- and early 20th-century urban rail transit maps that are held at the University of Chicago Library's Map Collection.
The maps roughly illustrate the history of urban rail transit between the 1860s and the 1920s.
These years were the heyday of urban rail transit. Virtually every city in the Western world and in its colonial offshoots had street railroads during much or all of this period. Streetcars were drawn by horses in the early years. The invention of the grip cable in 1870s and of electric traction in the late 1880s greatly increased their speed and reliability. By the end of the 19th century, everyday urban life was completely dependent on this mode of transport.
A few cities, however, were so large and congested that street railroads were insufficient. Steam railroad lines served the suburbs but were unwelcome in the center of the city. London, the largest city in the Western world, acquired what is generally considered the first more or less modern subway system when, beginning in 1863, its Metropolitan steam railroad line was extended in shallow tunnels along the edges of the central city. (Frequent openings allowed some of the smoke to escape.) New York, whose population was growing even faster than London’s, employed a different solution. Four steam-powered elevated railroads were built along most of the length of Manhattan. The first line opened in 1868. Although Istanbul acquired a short underground steam-powered funicular line (the "Tünel") in 1875 and Vienna opened a partly underground steam-powered rail line as late as 1898, the environmental drawbacks of steam power in the city discouraged other places from following suit.
The availability of cleaner electric traction in the 1890s reduced the "negative externalities" of grade-separated urban rail transit. London and New York began to electrify their older lines; London started building its deep-bored "Tube" lines; and new lines opened in Chicago, Budapest, Boston, and Glasgow. They were very different. Chicago acquired a (briefly steam powered) elevated railway. In Budapest and Boston streetcar subways were built. Glasgow’s circular subway was run by cable. A few other large cities (including Paris and Berlin) followed in the next decades, opting in most cases for a subway system with a few above-ground sections. But, even at the end of the 1920s, fewer than twenty cities in the world had grade-separated urban rail transit systems. Building such lines has always been enormously expensive and time-consuming. (This is one of the reasons that several of the lines shown on the maps below were never built, or at least not built in the form shown on the map.) The street railroad remained the backbone of urban rail transit in all but a few places.
Most of the transit maps linked on this page are commercial maps. Some emphasize certain lines at the expense of others. Some are essentially advertisements for a particular enterprise. Most are quite different from the kind of neutral, inclusive transit map that is now the norm in the Western world as a result of the shift to public ownership of urban rail lines.
This page provides access only to a small proportion of the urban rail maps that are held at the University of Chicago Map Collection. Additional maps are listed in the Library's on-line catalog under subject headings like "Local transit--[jurisdiction]--[city name]--Maps," "Subways--[jurisdiction]--[city name]--Maps," "Railroads, Elevated--[jurisdiction]--[city name]--Maps," "Street-railroads--[jurisdiction]--[city name]--Maps," and "Railroads--[jurisdiction]--[city name]--Maps." This approach works for finding English-language records on WorldCat too.
Urban rail transit maps are very common on the Web. For contemporary urban rail transit maps (and an enormous number of links to other sites), go to Urbanrail.net . The companion Web pages, Chicago in the 1890s , Chicago, 1900-1914 , Government maps of Chicago in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s , and Social scientists map Chicago , provide access to several additional transit maps of Chicago.
The maps were scanned on a Contex Crystal XL42 scanner at 400 dpi using NextImage software.
You can access these files in two different ways:
[1] Click on the thumbnails below to see the files in a program called Zoomify. Zoomify breaks the original tiff files into tiny jpegs, so you can zoom in and out and move around quickly and efficiently. Zoomify requires Flash and so won't work on many mobile phones.
[2] You can also see the files through Luna. Luna, like Zoomify, allows you to zoom in and out and to move around. It also allows download of jpeg versions of the files (click "Export"). To access the Luna files, click on the "Click here for Luna version" button.
The original tiff files are also available. E-mail from the "Questions about this page?" button below.
Downloaded files are freely available for personal or scholarly use. If you use the images in a publication, we expect that you will mention that the original maps--and the files--are from the University of Chicago Library's Map Collection.
Several people contributed to the construction of this Web page. Joel Thomas of the Map Collection did essentially all the scanning, most of the record manipulation, and a modest amount of Photoshop editing. He also did some last-minute preservation work on two of the sheets. Dale Mertes of Networking Services and Information Technologies' Academic Technologies unit continued to provide good advice about scanning. John Jung and Charles Blair of the University of Chicago Library's Digital Library Development Center did the necessary server tweaking. Bridget Madden of the University of Chicago's Visual Resources Center and Charles Blair developed a protocol in 2015 that allows access via Luna. And Bobby Butler, Emily Thompson, and Michael Weinrib of the Map Collection edited this page to point to the Luna versions.
The links below are listed in chronological order.