Checking in DC/Baltimore Railways in 1921

t’s been many weeks since the last update on the mapping projects – it will be weekly from here on in – but there has been considerable progress made on the DC/Baltimore map.

When last we met, I had finished up Baltimore and was on my way to Washington. We’ve made it way, way out of Washington now, with service patterns to Hagerstown, Richmond, and York all laid out. I’ve finally started to chart out river ferry service, which means laying out geography, and that means I can start putting together service to the Eastern Shore and Delaware.

So much progress.

With 950 or so stops to cover, this has been the largest single project I’ve done. Given that it’s nearly August, and the expected delivery was June, this is also taking much longer than I thought it would. And, it’s only getting larger, with additional railway service in the Eastern Shore, where there’s room for it, and a new connection between Winchester, Martinsburg, and Hagerstown.

In the end, this will show nearly all of the railway networks of Maryland and Delaware and about a quarter of Virginia’s, along with slivers of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I’d like to revisit these states and do state-isolated maps at some point, but not for a long while.

The purpose of maps like this is to show some of the underlying travel patterns that informed our built environment. As well, when activists consider whether to convert an old railway to a trail, or to build a new rail line, they may want to look at old rights-of-way to see whether there’s some latent transit potential there.

This map is available for pre-order in the Map Store, alongside finished prints of the Marin County Interurban in 1939 and the San Francisco Bay Area in 1937.