The Map Of Many Colours

While I was on holiday I received several messages through various social medias along the lines of "Northern have released a new map with coloured lines - did you know?"  I'm strangely touched that I have become "that Northern map person"; it's certainly a better legacy than "local weirdo".  

Northern covers a massive portion of England, with some of the largest cities in the country, and its diagram has always struggled to reflect that.  The old map, which is still available on the website, puts everything in corporate purple and shows that yes, it is possible to get from point A to point B.  There's no attempt at showing quality of service or, for that matter, if there's a single train or more than one on a route.  You can use a finger to trace a single uninterrupted line from Liverpool to Lincoln without being aware that there is no such train.

The new map uses colour to break the network into lines, of sorts, which could be overwhelming for such a large region.  I think they've pulled it off.  They've used what I think of as the German style of map, where lozenges run across shared lines and dots indicate stops.  This style manages to wrestle the S- and U-Bahns together into some kind of logical shape and it makes sense to apply it to Northern. 

What's pleasing is how they've done it.  The map moves inwards, starting with groups of colours on the coast.  Trains through Tyneside and Teesside are blue, in various shades; through Humberside, they're pinks and purples.  Your eye bunches them together.

The west coast gets a similar treatment; blues and greens into Liverpool and the tips of Merseyrail, pinks and reds to Chester.

It means that when you get to Manchester, arguably the centre of the map (if not geographically) you can sort of work out where the lines are going from their colours alone.  That straight line Metrolink connection between Victoria and Piccadilly, by the way?  Absolute chef's kiss.  Beautifully done.

Manchester also shows how the extreme complexity of a station doesn't mean that it's confusing.  Piccadilly has twelve coloured dots inside its lozenge, three of which are through lines, but it's not complicated.  You feel reassured looking at this that though you'll have to change trains to get from Newton-le-Willows to Levenshulme, it'll be a simple manoeuvre, a shift from one platform to another.

Through lines in the middle of the map are also easy to follow; that swap of the greens via Brighouse is beautifully elegant.  I like that clear 90 degree of the grey line via Mirfield, and it does the best it can with the stations between Stalybridge and Huddersfield; it's absurd that a map covering the North implies there's some sort of service gap between Manchester and Leeds because that's a different franchise, but there you go.  

Leeds has a massive fourteen dots, so many they've had to create a gap so they can fit the station name in somewhere, which is a shame because it wrecks the flow.  They've also done the best they can with the pestilent Castleford loop, a weird lump of odd services and reversals in Yorkshire.

You can see the East Coast Main Line sweeping across the Goole line there in grey, providing a backbone to the right hand side of the map and stretching off to Scotland in the north and London to the south.

Interestingly ("interestingly") an attempt to do the same on the left hand side with the West Coast Main Line falls apart in the pathfinding.  Northern services share the line so the grey vanishes under some green at Wigan; this is because stations like Euxton Balshaw Lane are served by Northern but have fast intercities ploughing through.

The grey reappears north of Oxenholme Lake District but it emerges from a blue line; the green has headed off to Blackpool after Preston.  There should be a small bit of grey running under the lines outside Preston to show it's connected because right now they're two separate routes.  Is this nitpicking?  Absolutely.  Isn't that what you came here for though?  Be honest. 

There are a few other bits that irritate me.  I hate this line crossing outside Barnsley, though I totally understand why it's there.

Shipley is a hot mess:

And there's only one spot where the interchange happens between two lines at right angles, at Romiley, and it doesn't quite work.  The red is broken by the yellow.

They've called Headbolt Lane "Kirkby Headbolt Lane," which is incorrect, and this isn't their fault of course but the sheer number of "temporarily closed" stations is depressing. 

Also not their fault is this bit.

We're really going with "Bee Network Trams", are we Andy?  Even though Metrolink is a perfectly good brand already? 

 

This map is perhaps more angled at tourists than locals, or at least, getting people to move outside their homes.  They've highlighted the great estuaries and bays on the coasts, the national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, and, yes, they've included those damn heritage railways that drive me up the wall.  This includes the Keighly and Worth Valley Railway, which never used to be there, and has now given me an extra station to visit.

Speaking of extra stations I haven't been to, the Ashington Line is there in - I was going to say "all its glory" but it's very much a work in progress. 

Horden continues to haunt me below Sunderland, and for no apparent reason Newark Northgate has popped up.  I can only think the designers saw that big white gap in the bottom right hand corner and decided to fill it with something.  I'd have preferred a picture of a fire-breathing lizard and here be dragons because really, who wants to go to Newark?

The map is, in my opinion, a triumph.  It shows you want you want to know, it's bright and cheery, it doesn't have station names crossing the lines or any of those other bugbears.  It's simple to use.  It's brilliant.  (I will caveat that I'm speaking as a person with full colour vision; I don't know how it reads if you're colour blind).  There's a small renaissance going on in railway design at the moment - I've waxed about the wonderful posters Merseyrail is turning out before - and this is another victory.  I might have to get one for my wall.