#elron

Elron System Map (Estonia)

Buy this map on posters, shirts, and more: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/104238761

Märkus: ma räägin null eesti keelt. Vabandan kirjavigade ja kehva grammatika pärast.

Here’s my take on a system map of Estonia’s national railway Elron! Or, well, I suppose “map” is a bit of a stretch here, because it doesn’t even come close to representing the country’s geography. I’d originally planned a schematic map more in the style of my depiction of Morocco’s ONCF network, but there was so much whitespace that I decided a tree diagram would be more fitting. This actually harkens back to some of my earliest mapmaking inspirations—such as this Metro-North map by Robert McConnell, and the almost-matching MBTA map that seems to have disappeared from the internet.

When it comes to the Elron network itself, the service patterns are actually pretty cleanly designed. As such, I decided to show all of them—every single stopping pattern used by every train on the network. (Right down to having a separate route for the Tallinn-Turba trains that skip Jaanika, for instance.) On most networks of this size, this is a really bad idea simply due to the sheer number of various stopping patterns—but since this network had relatively few of them, and since I was already using a tree diagram, it was completely achievable here. I also added a table of daily outbound/inbound service frequencies, with separate columns for Monday to Thursday, Friday, Saturday/holidays, and Sunday.

The Ⓛ symbol indicates stations with short platforms, which apparently are really short—the timetables say that the doors will only open on one car. This was included on the timetables, but I figured it’d be worth including here too—there was plenty of room for it, after all.

Kalten: Should we point out that we’re church knights?