Be Careful What You Wish For

Back in May, I pointed out that there are no Merseyrail maps on the new trains.  I said this was a terrible shame.

Clearly I have an enormous influence over at Rail House because there are now Merseyrail maps on the new trains.  The only problem is they're not very good.

There are some great, talented graphic designers working at Merseyrail, producing some fantastic pieces of promotional material.  I assume they were all on holiday when this was made.

Let's start with the colours.  Yes, I've long said that there are Colour Tsars demanding that everything is yellow and grey, so I get why they've persisted with it here.  Even though it looks awful.  But making the region yellow and marking it as "Merseyrail network" in the key makes absolutely no sense at all.  So the Merseyrail network isn't those little green and blue lines where the trains run?  It's all the land inbetween?  It's Neston and Huyton and Frodsham and all those other places you can't get a Merseyrail train to - indeed, it's places that don't even have a railway station.  What they mean is "this is where Merseyrail tickets are vaild" - Day Savers and the like - but that's not what it says.

The reason for it is simple of course - they've used the old Merseytravel map, now called the "Local Rail Network" map, and stripped off anything that's not Merseyrail.  Why they have done this is purely a business decision; you're on a Merseyrail train, here's all the Merseyrail destinations, done.  It doesn't matter that it's actually quite useful information to know; that other networks show this sort of thing (the Tube map is overwhelmed with lines that aren't actually tube lines); and that getting rid of them means you now have to fill the space with horrible big grey boxes telling you that there are connections available.  The box at Bidston, for example, says this:
 

If only there were a quicker, easier, and more logical way to show this, like, oh I don't know, actually including the line on the map:

They've made the map wordier and more complicated for no reason at all.  It also means there's a big yellow space which is sitting there, unused.

And bloody Nora those grey boxes are ugly.  The directional spikes are horrible and the determination to not show any actual lines on the line diagram means they're scattered all over the place - the right hand side of the map has four boxes on it and only two of them have edges that line up. 

You can also see how copying over the map from the original means that Lime Street is shortened to "Lime St".  The reason this happens on the Local Rail Network Map is because there's not much room to fit it in.  Here you've got all the space in the world.  You could put Lime Street Lower Level if you really wanted to.

(I should clarify that this area on the Local Rail Network map isn't any good either.  Edge Hill is way too close, the spacing of stations on the Northern Line between Brunswick and Cressington is all over the place - who knows what it's going to look like when Baltic turns up - and why isn't James Street in capital letters when it's a city centre station on the Loop?  But all that's for a different rant.  Oh, and also the webpage on the Merseytravel site where the map is held calls it the "Local Rail Newtwork Map". 

Which, while amusing, is just sloppy).

The Merseyrail map on the trains really is a case of "will this do?".  There was an opportunity here for a proper redesign where those gifted designers I talked about earlier could be given a blank canvas and allowed a ground-up rethink.  Put the two Merseyrail lines on the trains and think about it as an opportunity.  Alternatively, stick with what you know and put the Local Rail Network Map on the trains.  This halfway house is no good to anyone.