I am Theodoræ Ditsek, and I draw transit maps over here. This is an enormous project that got a whole site of its own because it’s too big for my main blog.
This is something I’d wanted to do for a very long time, largely springing from some pathological completionist need to know where all the train lines were and where they went. These are a series of regional rail crayon maps for (almost) every US state and Canadian province. These are not the beautiful crayon maps. These are the maps that help make the beautiful crayon maps happen. They’re meant to function as a reference more than anything else, and they can be adjusted as needed to suit the purposes of whatever fantasy map project you’re working on.
The overwhelming majority of these maps were drawn over their respective subnational entity’s page in the 1924 Rand McNally railroad atlas found in the online Rumsey archive. Since there are still a few railroad lines built after 1924, however, there was a fair amount of cross-checking done with OpenRailwayMap, especially in the mountain and west coast states, to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I probably still did. This is a big project.
Also, just because I don’t have a railway line drawn and numbered doesn’t mean it’s not supposed to have service. It could be a suburban rail line or (as is especially the case in Pennsylvania or West Virginia) it’s a local rural branch line that doesn’t provide mainline service and/or doesn’t connect to anything else. (I know the ones in eastern PA are kind of a mess so I’d recommend referring to the Greater New Jersey railroad map for some idea of how to untangle everything.)
They’re also meant to give an idea of what we could have had if we’d invested in our railroad network after World War II, instead of letting it rot. Everyone who abandoned trains for cars postwar was making a rational choice at the time, given the available options, but it was a choice made with certain systematic biases and unsubtle socioeconomic and governmental thumbs on the scale, and it didn’t have to happen. In a better world we still would not have had a rail network anywhere near as extensive as what’s shown here, but we could definitely have had something better than what we have now. This is the patently unrealistic opening salvo you negotiate down later to something reasonable.
Disclaimer: some of these maps are huge, like 13000×13000 huge, and I haven’t quite nailed down how to open some of ’em up full size yet. Once they’re in a new tab, if you’re on a Mac you should be able to zoom in with two fingers the way you would on an iPhone. I personally would recommend just downloading them, though.
Anyway here they are, loosely organized from west to east:
northamericaregionalbahn 