See the improved 2016 revision of this map!

Presenting the latest in my series of transit-styled diagrams (see also the Interstate System in the style of the London Underground and a Washington, DC Metro map redesign), the entire Amtrak passenger rail system in the style of a subway map.

Surprisingly, I haven’t seen another take on this anywhere else on the internet, but I guess it is a fairly monumental undertaking (Good thing I’m the patient type!). Every last station is shown, the result of a lot of research on both Amtrak’s official site and Wikipedia. Shown here are the two final versions of the map – one with all stations and routes listed, and one as more of an abstraction: simply the coloured route lines without any extraneous markings or text. The third image shows a detail of the map: the extremely congested and complex Northeast Corridor.

The other images attempt to show some of my working for a project of this scale. Once I compiled a list of all the routes and stations, I roughly plotted them on a map of the United States to see the geographical “lie of the land”. This also helped me work out where routes would sit in relation to each other to minimise line overlap on the final diagram. Once the routes were all plotted, I removed the underlying map to view only the routes: from here, it was just a matter of straightening and simplifying the routes to the 45-degree angles seen on most subway maps.

Zoomable On-line Preview of Amtrak Map

Large JPG Preview of Amtrak Map

UPDATE – November 26, 2012: I’ve updated this map with the latest route and station information. Only minor changes: extended the Downeaster to Brunswick, Maine, added a second Santa Clara station (University) to the Capital Corridor route, a couple of stations dropped off the Keystone service, fixed a few timetabling errors and typos.

UPDATE – December 11, 2012: Another update to include the new Northeast Regional service to Norfolk, Virginia.

UPDATE – October 9, 2013: Update to the Pacific Surfliner route: deleted the Orange and Laguna Niguel stations; added Carlsbad Village, Carlsbad Poinsettia, Encinitas and Sorrento Valley stations. Removed Richmond from the Coast Starlight. Added Ardmore back to the Pennsylvanian route – Amtrak’s site lists it as serving that line (it seems that it stops there only on Sundays).

UPDATE – January 7, 2015: Updated the Vermonter route: added the new Greenfield and Northampton stations; and removed Amherst station.

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