All the railroads and ferries DC and its environs had in 1921, in one subway-style map

[mahatmakanejeeves]

I believe he left out the electric railway to Fairfax: Washington, Arlington & Falls Church Railway. Maybe I just didn't notice it. I'll write him.

Wow, look at all the service.

All the railroads we had in 1921, in one subway-style map

by David Edmondson • February 24, 2016

In 1921, you could take the train from downtown DC to Annapolis, from Baltimore to Harrisburg, or Winchester to DC. I built a subway-style map of the rail service our region once had.



In the Mid-Atlantic region, hundreds of trains and ferries used to serve passengers at over 1,370 stations. But they were run by dozens of individual companies, meaning there was no single unified system map to let people know how to get from A to B. Passengers had to pour over dozens of often-opaque timetables to know how to get around.

Doing that was no simple task, as I can now attest to after having trawled hundreds of these tables in The Official Guide of the Railways to pull together this one map.

Subway-style maps were a genius invention of the early 20th Century. By combining old railway maps with service schedules, they allow travelers to understand at a glance how the transit system works without relying on byzantine schedules.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52055881@N07/24975713081/in/photostream/lightbox/

[happyslug]

1. This was done by various people in the early part of the 20th Century,

As late as 1929, you could obtain a schedule of all of the electric railways in Western Pennsylvania. You can get a copy of it from the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (Where I obtain mine many years ago).

These had been written for salesman so they could take these railways to the stores they were trying to get to buy their products. By the late 1920s most salesmen had converted to driving by automobile. Automobile could get the salesman to where he wanted to be at any time, as oppose to the trolley schedule. Thus these stopped being produced after the late 1920s, for the demand for them disappeared.

Not that salesman stop using trolleys, the roads were still BAD in the 1920s (most road construction did not take place till the 1930s and the various New Deal Programs to get people back to work). But given the adoption of gasoline taxes starting in 1919, the states finally had a source of revenue to actually start to pave rural roads..

Most Urban areas roads were paid by 1920, but paid for by local taxes, urban areas did not start to get a share of the gasoline taxes till after WWII and in many ways did not get a "fair share" till the US Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to elect members of the State Legislature other then by districts of equal population. That decision was in 1964, which forced a lot of states to change how their elected members of their state house and state senate. Prior to 1964 many states gave more representatives to rural areas then urban areas and those rural representatives made sure the urban areas did not get an equal share of the gasoline tax and the roads paved by that tax (one way was for any state highway was paved in rural areas, but in urban areas the city had to pay to pave those state highways put of city taxes NOT the state gasoline tax).

I bring this up for most of the time tables were for interurban streetcars that were put out of business when the rural roads near them were paved. Many converted to buses for with buses you did not have to maintain the right of way (and then went out of business a few years later anyway).