Submitted by Shaul Picker, who says:

I found this map of the regional rail system in Philly from this 1989 SEPTA map to be interesting. I don’t know of any other map to use octagons. This map is notable for having “temporary” shuttle buses to Newtown and West Chester (service never returned), and for noting that service to Ivy Ridge on the R6 was “temporarily discontinued.” Service also never returned here. Note proposed stations at Claymont (which opened in 1991) and Baldwin (which never reopened) on the R2. This is one of the more aesthetically pleasing regional rail maps I have seen. You can see this and other SEPTA maps and timetables on my Flickr.

The first thing to notice here is just how much more understandable SEPTA Regional Rail service is on a diagram which doesn’t also have to show the subway and street-to-surface lines. This is a clean and simple diagram that uses some nice colour-coding to show the through-running of lines passing through the city center in the Center City Commuter Connection tunnel, which had only opened five years previously in 1984. The three stations highlighted by the unusual octagonal shapes were major components of this project.

The colour-coding is made slightly less effective by that fact that the trunk line from 30th Street all the way around to Glenside that is shared by many of the routes is represented a single grey line – it can sometimes be a little difficult to follow a route along its entire length because of this (the R2 is a good example). However, it’s a fairly simple network, so this isn’t an insurmountable problem.

The map is generally drawn well, though the R8 has to take a pretty unconvincing path from North Philadelphia up towards Chestnut Hill West, and the massively expanded central section means that the labelling gets perhaps a little too cramped towards the outer edges.

Finally, the scourge of “temporarily discontinued” rail services that never returned have rarely been laid out quite so clearly on a single map!

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Source: Union Turnpike/Flickr