My son loves trains. So I came up with a train related twist to an inspection of the periodic table. We sat and cut up a copy of the table and then rearranged each element as a ‘station’ on an underground rail system. Each line represents a characteristic shared by the elements on that line.

After (quite) a few drafts, and more time than I care to admit, we ended up with this.

It was constructed with the help of Metro Map Creator (no way I could have done it without this neat web app). If anyone fancies building some more lines I’ll happily send you the saved file (share using a creative commons attribution, non-commercial, share a like license) .

Let me know if you spot any errors.

Edit:

Thanks to Shaun, Max, Ian, Mitch, Yul, Labrat and Stu (alway handy to have a Nature Chemistry editor check your work) for spotting some mistakes. All corrected now.

Now on version 1.4. New line added, to show elements that were discovered via synthesis and then found in nature.