thetransitgirl

[thetransitgirl]

Moroccan commuter rail

Hullo! I'm pretty sure some of my followers are based in Morocco, and I'm wondering if any of y'all might be able/willing to get me information on some rail lines I can't find timetables for!

One thing I'm wondering about is Le Bouregreg, which seems to operate between Rabat and Salé—is this service in addition to the regular TNR service between Casablanca and Kénitra? If so, does it use the same rolling stock?

I'm also trying to figure out if Tanger has its own local lines in addition to Al Atlas. I've seen sites talking about there supposedly being eight trains per day between Tanger-Ville and Tanger-Med; are those still a thing? If so, what stops do they make?

And also, is there local service south of Tanger on the line used by Al Atlas? According to the ONCF site there are a few stations (Al Akba Lhamra, for instance) that are skipped by nearly every Al Atlas train, which makes me think there must be some kind of supplemental service.

Anyway, if anyone could get me any information on any of this, I'd be incredibly grateful! I'm hoping to make an improved version of my 2022 ONCF map, because I know I'm missing several routes and stations—and any help from on the ground in Morocco could go a long way :)

[thetransitgirl]

Tanzania SGR timetable, April 2025

Tanzania's new standard-gauge railway is probably the best in East Africa—fully electrified, with five daily round trips at speeds up to 160 km/h. Since the website doesn't have a timetable, I thought I'd make one!

The Royal Express service is indicated in a different color because unlike the Ordinary and Express trains, it has no economy seating—the cheapest seats on the Royal Express are Business Class.

This schedule can be operated with four trains in service—one eight-car train for the Royal Express, one ten-car train for the Morogoro short-turn, and two fourteen-car trains for the remaining three round trips. Since the fleet includes ten multiple units and seventeen locomotives, they're likely planning to significantly increase the level of service in the future, although some of the fleet's size is likely due to the extent of the future phases of the route.

[thetransitgirl]

Tren Maya timetable, April 2025

There's been a significant service expansion since the March timetable! Two additional round trips are now running between Cancún and Mérida, and trains 602 and 603 have been expanded to run the full route between Cancún and Chetumal. Accordingly, many departure times have been adjusted. (Times at Tenosique are still not available.)

The website is inconsistent about new trains 307 and 308: sometimes, the schedule finder will indicate that they run nonstop with a slightly later departure and a slightly earlier arrival. I'm fairly certain that either this is a website glitch or it's a service deviation run on select days.

Notably, this schedule can be operated with just ten trains in service—three more than the seven that were required for the March schedule. Since Tren Maya's full fleet will theoretically have 42 trains, it's likely that there'll be additional significant expansions to the schedule in the coming months.

[thetransitgirl]

Tren Maya timetable, March 2025

We've got a few changes since the previous timetables I posted in August! Most notably, the remaining segments have been opened: one new round trip operates from Palenque to Chetumal via Escárcega, while three round trips extend from Playa del Carmen to Tulum Aeropuerto, with one continuing to Chetumal.

Additionally, service from Cancún to Playa del Carmen has been cut back to two daily round trips, and several departure times have been adjusted. Times are now available for Nuevo Xcán, although still not for Tenosique.

Current service patterns are shown in the diagram below, with each line representing one daily round trip:

[thetransitgirl]

Oooo, that's actually really cool! I stopped it where I did because it was getting harder for me to tell apart the river from its tributaries, but I'm very glad to know about all that! I love the Passaic River; the Paterson Great Falls are one of the coolest places in the entire NYC region :D

NJ Transit Rail Network

A map I made last year that I forgot to post!

[thetransitgirl]

NJ Transit Rail Network

A map I made last year that I forgot to post!

[thetransitgirl]

Women want one thing and it's quite obvious, A large affordable interconnected North American Rail Network

[thetransitgirl]

Hello Transit Girl, Many thanks for the nice ONCF railwaymap. I'm not sure if you are still updating this map, or the level of detail your want to get into, but a small addition would be on the Nador - Taourirt line: there are about 4 extra daily departures, connecting in Taourirt onto the other services heading to Fes/Oujda. All the best, Mohamed

Oh, thank you so much Mohamed! I was actually just thinking recently that it'd be fun to make a new version of that. And I didn't know there were shuttle trains on that line; that's cool! I'll see if I can find timetables for it; maybe I'll end up making a new version of the map sometime soon! I can't promise though—but I'm really glad you liked the map! :D

[thetransitgirl]

Tren Maya timetable, August 2024

As far as I can tell, there aren't currently any publicly available timetables of Mexico's Tren Maya, and so I made some! These will theoretically be out of date later this month when the new line to Chetumal opens (and next month when the line between Chetumal and Cancún opens), and so I'll do my best to publish updates!

Arrival times are two minutes before the scheduled departure except where otherwise noted. The ticketing website doesn't include the stations at Tenosique and Nuevo Xcán, but it seems to suggest that trains do stop at both.

[thetransitgirl]

do you know the best places to get vintage maps of rail systems in asia and/or latin america? ive looked on ebay and etsy but am struggling to find anything outside of US/western europe

I’m afraid I have no idea; I apologize!

[thetransitgirl]

Commission Info

This is a first for me, but I am officially opening for commissions! If you have an idea for a schematic transit map you want me to make, now’s the perfect chance.

My rates for the moment are a base fee of $20, plus $10 for each route. So for example, that’s $30 for a single line, $50 for three lines, or $120 for ten lines. Branching, short routes, and overly complicated networks are case by case. Simple backgrounds and legends are included if desired.

Here are a few examples of my work!

[thetransitgirl]

why do you hate portland

I assume this is probably a troll question, but I am *fascinated* as to what led it to be asked in the first place.

[thetransitgirl]

Salt lake citizen here, what do you think about the UTA Trax System?

I’ve never had the chance to ride it, but I definitely respect that it doesn’t charge fares in the downtown zone! I also like how it connects to the FrontRunner at three different stations—a lot of comparable systems have just one commuter rail connection or even none. (Relatedly, the FrontRunner corridor is kind of a perfect fit for commuter rail and I’m a fan of how it was implemented.) Plus, a relatively new vehicle fleet is nothing to scoff at, even if some older trains are still in the mix for now.

While fifteen-minute headways are disappointingly low, from the schedules I’m seeing it looks like they’re synced up so that there’s never more than a seven-minute wait in the segment shared by all three lines. They seem to be spaced out so that the shared Blue/Green segment has nearly-even spacing between southbound trains while the shared Blue/Red segment has nearly-even spacing between the northbound trains. That sounded good until I realized that there’d be up to eleven-minute waits on those two segments in the reverse directions. I’d probably fix this by switching the endpoints of the Red and Green lines, so that the same two lines would cover the whole Temple to Murray route, while the third would run from the university to West Valley.

I was ready to be disappointed by the S-Line, but honestly the scheduling looks reasonable. The fifteen-minute headways sync up with the light rail, and there’s a direct transfer to/from all three lines with integrated fares. Plus, it looks like it has a dedicated lane for most if not all of the route? That’s the right way to do an integrated streetcar, even if the route is annoyingly short.

Which I guess brings me to the coverage question. Despite the good things I’ve listed so far, it’s still a light rail system in a large American city, so it’s obviously gonna have huge gaps in the network. The north/south coverage is pretty good (and the routing could have been a lot slower), but the east/west coverage is so bad that places like Magna Kearns and Holladay and Cottonwood Heights can be in the realm of five to ten miles from the nearest station. Bus connections don’t cut it; the region seriously needs expanded rail coverage. I could say that about anywhere in the country, of course, but it just goes to show that Salt Lake City can’t escape the ultimate weakness of American transit.

My ratings:

Fares: 7/10

Transfers: 9/10

Schedule: 6/10

Vehicles: 8/10

Routings: 8/10

Coverage: 3/10

Overall: 7/10

[thetransitgirl]

I almost completely forgot about this post I made seven years ago, but I'm not sure Metra did. They just proposed these fare zones for 2024, and it's kind of striking just how similar this is.

I have to say, though, I didn't expect them to lower fares *nearly* as much as they're doing. I live in New York now and I am so jealous of that $3.75 intermediate fare. And since that matches the Zone 2 fare, well…that means that someone in Zone 2 could get to literally any station on the system for $3.75.

Rumors have it that Chicago’s Metra plans to completely rework its fare system in the near future. So I put together a few ideas that could hopefully steer them in the right direction.

Firstly, the number of zones needs to be reduced dramatically. The current system of twelve or thirteen zones (depending on how you count) is WAY too complicated, and unnecessarily so. The number of zones could ideally be reduced to three or four. (A modification could count the five downtown stations as their own zone, so that trips downtown would be subject to an increased fare.)

Secondly, zones should be divided at major stations, which can count as part of each zone. For instance, on the map above, the Woodlawn-63rd station would be counted as in both Zone B and Zone D. This encourages travel in both directions from those stations, and in some cases (such as that of Woodlawn-63rd) makes it easier to transfer from one route to another.

Thirdly, fares should be determined simply by the number of zones crossed. A base fare could be set, such as $2.50, and an additional fee, such as $2.00, could be added based on how many zones are crossed. Given these example prices, a trip from Zone D to Zone B, covering three zones, would cost $8.50—still comparable to current prices for that region. Of course, prices would have to be carefully optimized to ensure no fares change too dramatically from their current values.

And finally, the system must be designed with transfers in mind. The example given here could easily be adjusted for trips between any two stations with transfers. Consider, for instance, a trip from Woodstock to Winnetka. The train from Woodstock begins in zone D and ends at Clybourn in zone B. The train from Clybourn ends in zone C. Since zone C was entered twice, it is counted as a four-zone trip (D-C-B-C), and under the example prices would have a fare of $10.50. Tickets could be designed to print multiple trips, and could print a space for conductors to punch on two different trains.

These ideas clearly show that a simpler fare structure for Metra is possible. When reworking the fares, Metra should take care to make sure simplicity takes priority.

P. S. No, I don’t just post Chicago things. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more!

[thetransitgirl]

View in full resolution

After almost six months of work, I'm proud to finally present my integrated commuter rail map of New York City and Philadelphia!

Showing five different commuter rail systems (CT Rail, Metro-North, LIRR, NJ Transit, and SEPTA), this map depicts everywhere a passenger can get to by train from NYC or Philadelphia without using Amtrak.

This is by far the most complicated map I've ever made, but I'm incredibly happy with the result! I'm planning to write some notes on the process of making this, but for now, I'm just proud that it's finally done.

[thetransitgirl]

This actually reminds me of another interesting thing I’d been wanting to talk about, because from my recollection of the timetables I believe there’s technically one train from the Raritan Valley Line that continues past Penn to Hoboken, and I’m pretty sure it’s the only one in either direction. It took a while to figure out whether to show it, but I eventually found some consistent logic for when to show alternate terminals. There are a lot of routes that do that, after all, and showing every single service deviation would clutter the map.

A few routes have semi-regular service into multiple terminals. On LIRR, that’d be Port Washington, inner Port Jefferson, Ronkonkoma, and Babylon, while on NJT that’d be Morristown and Montclair-Boonton, which have both peak and off-peak service into Hoboken, even if it is limited. All of those should definitely be shown as branches, ‘cause it’s part of the regular service pattern.

Then there are the diesel routes that typically require a transfer to continue into NYC but send a few peak-hour trips the rest of the way. On LIRR that’s Montauk, Oyster Bay, and Port Jefferson; on Metro-North that’s Danbury and the outer Harlem Line; on NJ Transit that’s the outer North Jersey Coast Line. These are better described as service extensions rather than as service deviations, since they still serve all their regular stations. And choosing not to include them would mean Hunterspoint Av and Long Island City wouldn’t appear on the map at all, since they’re served exclusively by extended peak-hour diesel trains. So I included these and marked them as irregular service. I didn’t include the

The remaining service variations are basically all just trains that follow the route’s usual service pattern but just go to a different endpoint. And these are all quite chaotic without any regularity to them—with three exceptions, all on the LIRR. The Babylon Branch sends three peak round-trips into Atlantic Terminal, and each of them only serves stops as far out as Freeport; this service is consistent enough to warrant being shown with a separate line. (After all, I had a line for the two daily outer-NJCL trips into Penn!) The second consistent exception is that for some reason the Far Rockaway and Long Beach branches switch their Manhattan terminals on weekends. Since this map is based mostly on weekday service patterns (with a number of route segments that don’t even operate on weekends), I didn’t show that. And the third exception is a single Friday train from Greenport that’s extended past Ronkonkoma to Jamaica, which only goes one way and is even more obscure than most of the weird peak-hour terminal switches. (And it doesn’t even look like it’s running at the moment, though I’m not sure.)

And so really, the map wouldn’t gain much from adding any of the service variations other than the diesel-route extensions and the Babylon Branch service to Atlantic Terminal. Sure, they’re connections that are technically possible, but only at very specific times—and they’re something that wouldn’t be useful to basically any user of the map.

A project I’ve been working on for several months is now almost finished :)

[thetransitgirl]

It is and it’s absolutely ridiculous. I’ve seen a few combined maps that include it, but for this map I’m interpreting it as not commuter rail because I don’t want it to be and because it’d be really hard to fit it on the map!

(I’m also probably gonna remove the Hoboken ferries, with the argument that they aren’t timed to connect with trains. It feels weird to have those when PATH is the more common transfer.)

A project I’ve been working on for several months is now almost finished :)