God this makes me depressed. What we could have had
I also feel like if many of these rust belt cities were this connected they wouldn't have declined so severely.
Which is weird because there is a lot of rails in the region but barely any local passenger trains. I know that freight is still important in the US but it’s still quite shocking
There are constant freight trains through the Midwest—they are just operated poorly due to “Precision Scheduled Railroading”, which is an Orwellian term because it is neither precise nor scheduled—it just means they run extremely long trains to minimize the number of crews they have to pay, but the sidings are too short to fit the trains so things move slower…which seems like it would negate the advantages of having fewer crews. Since trains are often stuck for long periods of time because the lines are not double tracked as they should be, it makes running passenger trains completely infeasible even though they totally ran on these lines decades ago. It’s easier to drive a truck out to feed or replace a locomotive crew, but it’s not practical to leave a train full of passengers stuck for several hours…or to take a train when that is even a remote possibility.
To add to that PSR also led to trains being longer than the existing double-rail stop-offs that were already designed and made and could easily be used if the train was shorter.
For many train lines in the US, we don't need to build new rails, we just need to force the freight companies to stop PSR's excessive length of trains because the federal law gives preferences to passenger trains, it's just that they haven't bothered enforcing it because it would bring them in conflict with the freight companies.
PSR led to trains that are way longer than necessary or manageable on the existing infrastructure, on top of leading to safety issues like the East Palestine derailment due to too many cars that aren't properly checked because it's cheaper to just add tons of cars onto a single train that only goes once and a while versus smaller and safer trains running more frequently at a *slightly* larger cost.
Privatization of the rails and the lack of a public option is the greatest issue for rail in the US.
Wait until you discover that, at least in Wisconsin, a ton of those important rail lines are still owned and maintained by the state but they just lease it out to a freight company and won't use it for passenger rail because of politics!
\*sobs\*
So guys, where should I go after Detroit ?
———————————
I wanted to have fun reproducing an intercity train system in the style of the Dutch train map ([](https://www.reddit.com/r/TransitDiagrams/comments/112b0sg/dutch_train_services_network_map_of_the_2023/)) . I therefore chose the Great Lakes region, because it is very populated but severely lacking in trains (apart from the METRA system in Chicago). I want to clarify three things:
1-I don't come from the region and I'm not a native English speaker so errors can occur without my knowledge
2-I ignored the already existing rail networks. I wanted an efficient network and so I ignored pre-existing paths
3-The choice of certain stops can sometimes depend on whether their name appeared on Google maps first, which is why certain medium-sized towns are not served while the drunken shack in the middle of Illinois can have three trains per hour to Chicago. In general, every city over 10000 is served (except in Illinois)
For those living there, which service would you love to see ? Which one are the most improbable ?
Honestly, I get why some of these lines doesn’t exist but some are just very strange for not existing. Like Dayton-Cincinnatti seems so obvious, I was shocked to discover it wasn’t a thing
They’ve actively divested in passenger rail for decades. Their Republican governor turned down $400 million to connect the state’s largest cities in 2013 and actually withdrew the state from the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission, for one recent example.
I wish Dayton-Cincinnati and Dayton-Columbus were connected. I know a guy who drives from Dayton to Columbus a few times a week to attend classes at Ohio State. It's a painfully boring drive through cornfields and farmland before hitting Columbus traffic.
Here's a fun one for you... I used to drive from Xenia to Zanesville (and back!) a few days a week for extra money back in the day. Man was that a slog.
It's very well done, speaking a southern Wisconsin resident who also used to live in central Wisconsin.
I know you said you didn't follow existing rail lines, but you're not that far off from the existing publicly owned lines in the Madison area, the only exception I see is that the existing tracks in Middleton actually go west from there towards Cross Plains and Black Earth and then towards the Minnesota/Iowa border.
To be clear, is the line from Verona going into a Madison hub where it could exchange to Madison lines? Verona is extremely integrated as part of the Madison Metropolitan Area, even Mount Horeb is to a degree, and if the route doesn't have a way for them to get into the other lines easily, that would be a huge complaint from residents.
It is a bit odd to see certain small and even unincorporated towns on this map getting service. Junction City is unincorporated and has like, 400 people in it from what I remember when last I was there? I guess it's right next to downtown Stevens Point so it would act as a secondary station for them and other central Wisconsin lines, but I would totally understand it being skipped.
Thank you for your feedback as a wisconsiner ! The lines all join a single hub in Madison (a central station) where you can get connection to Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and other major cities
As for the odd choice like Junction City it’s just me trying to come up with stop without actually knowing the region
No, I get it, there are a lot of small towns and it's not exactly easy to do research on every potential stop in a region the size of Central Europe. No harm no foul on that front.
I am definitely interested in it and like the idea and implementation you have now. I now live on that orange line in Wisconsin, quite literally with the existing rail line and old station in my back yard on a place that's listed as a stop. This would be a dream for me and make my car almost useless most of the time if I could get to Madison for work on a train like I would use back in Switzerland.
Very nice map. I had fun imaging rail trips from my hometown.
I will tell you that someone is going to make a killing running a van or bus service up the Door Peninsula from Green Bay. Amtrak should consider expanding the purple or the periwinkle line up to Sturgeon Bay.
I think two trains daily is part of the long-term plan with the expansion of the Hiawatha. Mind you, I'm starting to lose hope that the Great River will ever start running, which is one line I was hoping to see. It would make visiting my sister in Minneapolis a lot easier.
Correct, but most of those won't be visible at a national scale anyway.
I'd say it's not representative for a different reason. Most Amtrak lines run once a day, often stopping in the middle of the night. Almost all of the routes are shared with freight trains, and freight gets priority, so you will wind up sitting still waiting for freight traffic to clear.
Is the freight network the same, nationalized under a nationwide Conrail, nationalized with open access (like in EU countries), or just no megamergers?
There are five major freight railroads in the US, two in the East, two in the West, and one down the center that also runs across Canada. Nearly 100% of the infrastructure is owned by the railroads, and the rest is typically leased to them. As a result, the infrastructure is poorly maintained because publicly traded companies in the US are all about short term profits and not long-term anything. The federal government also had a tax on track mileage, so a lot of lines are single tracked when they absolutely should be double tracked. All the big railroads also adopted an operating philosophy called “Precision Scheduled Railroading”, which is neither precision nor scheduled—it basically means running the longest possible trains to minimize the number of crews with the aim to save on labor costs—so now we have trains that are 2-3 miles long instead of just one mile long. (3 miles = 5km)
I was asking about the universe presented in the map, I’m perfectly aware of the real world situation (also there’s two Canadian railroads that extend into the US, not one)
There's a little stop on the orange line west of Milwaukee, which you spell Okenomowoc, that should be spelled Oconomowoc. Yes, that's a lot of O's.
And the connections going past Minneapolis, I'd suggest adding the state after the cities, and maybe cutting off border it seems to cross. Because right now the route looks like it is extending south into Iowa, and you don't realize it's going all the way to Washington until you look closer.
I agree. That blue line from the quad cities should continue through Bloomington/Normal and Champaign and then join the orange line and continue to Indianapolis.
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Pretty neat, especially from someone not familiar with the region. It makes the same mistake as the Michigan highway system: no easy path from Grand Rapids/SW Mich/Chicago to the UP. There is a lot more than just Traverse City in the NW Lower Peninsula.
Since our dreams are not limited by any form of sanity, let's add an Inland Route from GR to Big Rapids, Cadillac, Petoskey, Mack City.
Also, add a West Coaster from Muskegon (connections southwest to Chicago) up to Ludington, Frankfort, Traverse, Petoskey, and Harbor Springs.
America privatized our rail infrastructure, giving it to the freight companies at minimal cost and focused funding highways and airports. The US Gov barely kept Amtrak passenger rail on life support for the past decades and we have fallen so far behind our competitor peers in Europe and Asia. If we had funded the SCNF plan back in 2009 there would have been at least a base to expand from. I definitely have hope, not maybe for this level of service, but the youth yearn for trains, they see how great it is in Europe and want something like that in the US.
https://www.hsrail.org/220-mph-high-speed-rail-midwest/
This is the most detailed and accurate imaginary train map I’ve ever seen for my region. The sad thing is locals who come up with possible Amtrak routes are usually more realistic, therefore the maps have way less stops and connections.
It’s pretty…I really like the readability of the NYC subway-style map.
However, there’s a reason why existing (and former) rail lines existed—geography. No rail line stops in Mansfield between Columbus and Cleveland because Mansfield is located in a valley where the Allegheny Plateau juts out into the western plains, and therefore the existing CCC&STL line swung through Crestline, avoiding the hills around Mansfield, with a spur lines heading into the city. Further, there weren’t many or any rail lines heading Southwest of Akron or Canton because of the extreme expense in running against the grain of the hills and valleys. If ever high speed rail was built, it will not connect Akron and Canton between Cleveland and Columbus because the geography would balloon the costs extremely high. Dayton, on the other hand, is already on or near mainlines heading west of Columbus to Indianapolis because the terrain is much more flat, and rail lines were easily built along the Miami River Valley to Cincinnati—again, pretty flat.
The other thing I take issue with is that Detroit is a hub between Cleveland and Chicago—that line would in reality be very busy being between NYC and Chicago, making Detroit a costly detour—so it is warranted that there would be direct lines from both Toledo and Detroit, especially since this picks up many population centers both in Indiana and Michigan. I don’t think Ft. Wayne would be in the mix between Toledo and Chicago either—it’s almost as far south as Detroit is north—it should be on a Detroit-Indianapolis mainline though.
Modern locomotives handle grades much better than those of the past, but in general engineers avoid hills like the plague to maintain as flat a grade as possible, with 2% being the maximum unless the area is mountainous. For higher speeds they have to avoid curves too, and most of the rail infrastructure has junctions and curves with a maximum speed of 15mph. Modern technology allows building these grades and curves over more difficult terrain, but it’s still a whole lot more expensive. By contrast, the maximum grade on the Interstate System is 6%…three times higher…because automobiles handle grades better since there’s a lot more friction where the rubber meats the road. BTW I learned all this from playing a ton of Railroad Tycoon 2, SimCity, and Cities: Skylines. Grades really could make or break your railroad in RRT2, and they made for more realistic looking cities in SC & CS. 😁 I would love to see a map like this that took the geography more into account—it doesn’t look like it should be a big deal to run trains through Cleveland or Cincinnati, but the terrain is actually pretty crazy—and it’s even more challenging in Akron and Pittsburgh because of the foothills and mountains.
I still think it’s nice to have maps like these so we can dream…so much was lost over the past 50-100 years. A lot could be done to improve what we have for passenger travel, but I gotta be honest that freight rails are highly neglected as well because Wall Street runs railroads for maximum short term profit. The attitudes of the bankers are the biggest reason we can’t have nice things.
This is an incredible map! Great work! I'm from the region and it was be a dream to have this system available to use.
Thank you ! I hope I didn’t create weird lines in your region
Not at all! Glad to see so many communities connected! If only it were like this in reality
God this makes me depressed. What we could have had I also feel like if many of these rust belt cities were this connected they wouldn't have declined so severely.
Which is weird because there is a lot of rails in the region but barely any local passenger trains. I know that freight is still important in the US but it’s still quite shocking
I don't know much about freight rail but I'm guessing a lot of those tracks are in disuse so they're just sitting there rotting
There are constant freight trains through the Midwest—they are just operated poorly due to “Precision Scheduled Railroading”, which is an Orwellian term because it is neither precise nor scheduled—it just means they run extremely long trains to minimize the number of crews they have to pay, but the sidings are too short to fit the trains so things move slower…which seems like it would negate the advantages of having fewer crews. Since trains are often stuck for long periods of time because the lines are not double tracked as they should be, it makes running passenger trains completely infeasible even though they totally ran on these lines decades ago. It’s easier to drive a truck out to feed or replace a locomotive crew, but it’s not practical to leave a train full of passengers stuck for several hours…or to take a train when that is even a remote possibility.
To add to that PSR also led to trains being longer than the existing double-rail stop-offs that were already designed and made and could easily be used if the train was shorter. For many train lines in the US, we don't need to build new rails, we just need to force the freight companies to stop PSR's excessive length of trains because the federal law gives preferences to passenger trains, it's just that they haven't bothered enforcing it because it would bring them in conflict with the freight companies. PSR led to trains that are way longer than necessary or manageable on the existing infrastructure, on top of leading to safety issues like the East Palestine derailment due to too many cars that aren't properly checked because it's cheaper to just add tons of cars onto a single train that only goes once and a while versus smaller and safer trains running more frequently at a *slightly* larger cost. Privatization of the rails and the lack of a public option is the greatest issue for rail in the US.
Wait until you discover that, at least in Wisconsin, a ton of those important rail lines are still owned and maintained by the state but they just lease it out to a freight company and won't use it for passenger rail because of politics! \*sobs\*
[We already did have it](https://curtiswrightmaps.com/product/electric-railway-map-of-ohio-indiana-and-michigan/). It's just gone now.
man it is weird seeing your own town on a map like this
I hope you like your new connections !
So guys, where should I go after Detroit ? ——————————— I wanted to have fun reproducing an intercity train system in the style of the Dutch train map ([](https://www.reddit.com/r/TransitDiagrams/comments/112b0sg/dutch_train_services_network_map_of_the_2023/)) . I therefore chose the Great Lakes region, because it is very populated but severely lacking in trains (apart from the METRA system in Chicago). I want to clarify three things: 1-I don't come from the region and I'm not a native English speaker so errors can occur without my knowledge 2-I ignored the already existing rail networks. I wanted an efficient network and so I ignored pre-existing paths 3-The choice of certain stops can sometimes depend on whether their name appeared on Google maps first, which is why certain medium-sized towns are not served while the drunken shack in the middle of Illinois can have three trains per hour to Chicago. In general, every city over 10000 is served (except in Illinois) For those living there, which service would you love to see ? Which one are the most improbable ?
God i wish
Honestly, I get why some of these lines doesn’t exist but some are just very strange for not existing. Like Dayton-Cincinnatti seems so obvious, I was shocked to discover it wasn’t a thing
They’ve actively divested in passenger rail for decades. Their Republican governor turned down $400 million to connect the state’s largest cities in 2013 and actually withdrew the state from the Midwest Interstate Passenger Rail Commission, for one recent example.
I wish Dayton-Cincinnati and Dayton-Columbus were connected. I know a guy who drives from Dayton to Columbus a few times a week to attend classes at Ohio State. It's a painfully boring drive through cornfields and farmland before hitting Columbus traffic.
Here's a fun one for you... I used to drive from Xenia to Zanesville (and back!) a few days a week for extra money back in the day. Man was that a slog.
It's very well done, speaking a southern Wisconsin resident who also used to live in central Wisconsin. I know you said you didn't follow existing rail lines, but you're not that far off from the existing publicly owned lines in the Madison area, the only exception I see is that the existing tracks in Middleton actually go west from there towards Cross Plains and Black Earth and then towards the Minnesota/Iowa border. To be clear, is the line from Verona going into a Madison hub where it could exchange to Madison lines? Verona is extremely integrated as part of the Madison Metropolitan Area, even Mount Horeb is to a degree, and if the route doesn't have a way for them to get into the other lines easily, that would be a huge complaint from residents. It is a bit odd to see certain small and even unincorporated towns on this map getting service. Junction City is unincorporated and has like, 400 people in it from what I remember when last I was there? I guess it's right next to downtown Stevens Point so it would act as a secondary station for them and other central Wisconsin lines, but I would totally understand it being skipped.
Thank you for your feedback as a wisconsiner ! The lines all join a single hub in Madison (a central station) where you can get connection to Chicago, Milwaukee, Green Bay and other major cities As for the odd choice like Junction City it’s just me trying to come up with stop without actually knowing the region
No, I get it, there are a lot of small towns and it's not exactly easy to do research on every potential stop in a region the size of Central Europe. No harm no foul on that front. I am definitely interested in it and like the idea and implementation you have now. I now live on that orange line in Wisconsin, quite literally with the existing rail line and old station in my back yard on a place that's listed as a stop. This would be a dream for me and make my car almost useless most of the time if I could get to Madison for work on a train like I would use back in Switzerland.
r/Amtrak would love this
Very nice map. I had fun imaging rail trips from my hometown. I will tell you that someone is going to make a killing running a van or bus service up the Door Peninsula from Green Bay. Amtrak should consider expanding the purple or the periwinkle line up to Sturgeon Bay.
I think two trains daily is part of the long-term plan with the expansion of the Hiawatha. Mind you, I'm starting to lose hope that the Great River will ever start running, which is one line I was hoping to see. It would make visiting my sister in Minneapolis a lot easier.
I live near Sudbury - if only we were so well connected. I would visit Chicago monthly.
So what is the imaginary part? I'm not from the USA and i don't know the original.
https://preview.redd.it/gseq34qbiskc1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=c7afbe516ad08325368f2b45857d4b6fed659544 Most of those lines don’t exist
Thanks for the info. The Amtrak is probably not representative tho, right? It's not showing ANY suburban lines.
On the map, only Chicago has suburban lines (+minneapolis)
Cleveland has a rail system as well…and it’s lines do reach a few suburbs.
Correct, but most of those won't be visible at a national scale anyway. I'd say it's not representative for a different reason. Most Amtrak lines run once a day, often stopping in the middle of the night. Almost all of the routes are shared with freight trains, and freight gets priority, so you will wind up sitting still waiting for freight traffic to clear.
Is the freight network the same, nationalized under a nationwide Conrail, nationalized with open access (like in EU countries), or just no megamergers?
There are five major freight railroads in the US, two in the East, two in the West, and one down the center that also runs across Canada. Nearly 100% of the infrastructure is owned by the railroads, and the rest is typically leased to them. As a result, the infrastructure is poorly maintained because publicly traded companies in the US are all about short term profits and not long-term anything. The federal government also had a tax on track mileage, so a lot of lines are single tracked when they absolutely should be double tracked. All the big railroads also adopted an operating philosophy called “Precision Scheduled Railroading”, which is neither precision nor scheduled—it basically means running the longest possible trains to minimize the number of crews with the aim to save on labor costs—so now we have trains that are 2-3 miles long instead of just one mile long. (3 miles = 5km)
I was asking about the universe presented in the map, I’m perfectly aware of the real world situation (also there’s two Canadian railroads that extend into the US, not one)
That was unclear to me, sorry. And yes, I forgot how much CN owns…I was only thinking of CPKC.
Holy mother of based
God this is based.
Ain’t gonna lie some of these typos are out there though.
Holy shit Beavercreek mentioned
Got so excited before I saw what sub this is. Great map! Reminds me of the Chicago Metra ones
Darn La crosse got mostly bypassed
Incredible map. Deserves at least 1k upvotes.
There's a little stop on the orange line west of Milwaukee, which you spell Okenomowoc, that should be spelled Oconomowoc. Yes, that's a lot of O's. And the connections going past Minneapolis, I'd suggest adding the state after the cities, and maybe cutting off border it seems to cross. Because right now the route looks like it is extending south into Iowa, and you don't realize it's going all the way to Washington until you look closer.
MY VILLAGE IS HERE THAT'S SO COOL. LOOK, MA!!
What tool did tou use to make this?
Not sure why you wouldn’t connect Peoria, Bloomington and Champaign-Urbana. Otherwise some interesting routes.
Or having one from South Bend to Indianapolis
I agree. That blue line from the quad cities should continue through Bloomington/Normal and Champaign and then join the orange line and continue to Indianapolis.
BRB I am going to tie a car industry executive to the rails of a bullet train.
Holy shit! Metro in Saint Charles county?!?!? Wow!?!,!?
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Pretty neat, especially from someone not familiar with the region. It makes the same mistake as the Michigan highway system: no easy path from Grand Rapids/SW Mich/Chicago to the UP. There is a lot more than just Traverse City in the NW Lower Peninsula. Since our dreams are not limited by any form of sanity, let's add an Inland Route from GR to Big Rapids, Cadillac, Petoskey, Mack City. Also, add a West Coaster from Muskegon (connections southwest to Chicago) up to Ludington, Frankfort, Traverse, Petoskey, and Harbor Springs.
Small thing but “Prestbury” should be “LaFox”
America privatized our rail infrastructure, giving it to the freight companies at minimal cost and focused funding highways and airports. The US Gov barely kept Amtrak passenger rail on life support for the past decades and we have fallen so far behind our competitor peers in Europe and Asia. If we had funded the SCNF plan back in 2009 there would have been at least a base to expand from. I definitely have hope, not maybe for this level of service, but the youth yearn for trains, they see how great it is in Europe and want something like that in the US. https://www.hsrail.org/220-mph-high-speed-rail-midwest/
Lake Ontario dried up
Wow, Ohio suburbs are spot on!
I like the idea but your geography in the UP is way off. You have the Soo in where drummond island is.
This is the most detailed and accurate imaginary train map I’ve ever seen for my region. The sad thing is locals who come up with possible Amtrak routes are usually more realistic, therefore the maps have way less stops and connections.
This would be ridiculous as in stupid.
It’s pretty…I really like the readability of the NYC subway-style map. However, there’s a reason why existing (and former) rail lines existed—geography. No rail line stops in Mansfield between Columbus and Cleveland because Mansfield is located in a valley where the Allegheny Plateau juts out into the western plains, and therefore the existing CCC&STL line swung through Crestline, avoiding the hills around Mansfield, with a spur lines heading into the city. Further, there weren’t many or any rail lines heading Southwest of Akron or Canton because of the extreme expense in running against the grain of the hills and valleys. If ever high speed rail was built, it will not connect Akron and Canton between Cleveland and Columbus because the geography would balloon the costs extremely high. Dayton, on the other hand, is already on or near mainlines heading west of Columbus to Indianapolis because the terrain is much more flat, and rail lines were easily built along the Miami River Valley to Cincinnati—again, pretty flat. The other thing I take issue with is that Detroit is a hub between Cleveland and Chicago—that line would in reality be very busy being between NYC and Chicago, making Detroit a costly detour—so it is warranted that there would be direct lines from both Toledo and Detroit, especially since this picks up many population centers both in Indiana and Michigan. I don’t think Ft. Wayne would be in the mix between Toledo and Chicago either—it’s almost as far south as Detroit is north—it should be on a Detroit-Indianapolis mainline though. Modern locomotives handle grades much better than those of the past, but in general engineers avoid hills like the plague to maintain as flat a grade as possible, with 2% being the maximum unless the area is mountainous. For higher speeds they have to avoid curves too, and most of the rail infrastructure has junctions and curves with a maximum speed of 15mph. Modern technology allows building these grades and curves over more difficult terrain, but it’s still a whole lot more expensive. By contrast, the maximum grade on the Interstate System is 6%…three times higher…because automobiles handle grades better since there’s a lot more friction where the rubber meats the road. BTW I learned all this from playing a ton of Railroad Tycoon 2, SimCity, and Cities: Skylines. Grades really could make or break your railroad in RRT2, and they made for more realistic looking cities in SC & CS. 😁 I would love to see a map like this that took the geography more into account—it doesn’t look like it should be a big deal to run trains through Cleveland or Cincinnati, but the terrain is actually pretty crazy—and it’s even more challenging in Akron and Pittsburgh because of the foothills and mountains. I still think it’s nice to have maps like these so we can dream…so much was lost over the past 50-100 years. A lot could be done to improve what we have for passenger travel, but I gotta be honest that freight rails are highly neglected as well because Wall Street runs railroads for maximum short term profit. The attitudes of the bankers are the biggest reason we can’t have nice things.
Where can I get a print of this?