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Setting about the
task
My first action was easy - I
bought a BR(SR) timetable for I think 6d. That gave
me every train on the system including rush-hour
specials. Designing a network map is one of the few
things you can work on where 'no experience needed'
is a fact. However, plenty of sitting and thinking
was necessary, such as thinking what the limiting
factors were. It struck me that the station names
needed to be in as large a print size as possible
so you could read them from several feet away. This
was not really possible on the present map. To
allow for the large print size I discovered that I
needed to show almost all the rail lines at an
angle so that the station names could appear in
layers and not following one another as they would
be if the line was shown horizontally. This was
really the clue to the whole thing. To look right
all the angles had to be the same and the distances
apart of parallel rail lines needed to be
identical. There was a fair amount of latitude but
stations needed to remain more or less in their
actual geographical juxtaposition. I decided that
whereas Beck's LT map used a different color for
each line, I would use color to indicate the
terminal station served by each route. When I
really got started I worked with thick rug wool of
four different colors. I moved the wool around on
pins on a board to try and achieve the criteria
stated above. Wherever possible I positioned the
start of the printing of the station name to the
immediate right of the station symbol and only
where this was impossible to do did I allow a
station name to overrun the the colored rail line.
I needed to add the river as straight as I could
get it although it has plenty of twists and turns
in reality. It was a case of gradual and repeated
trial and error, moving the wool to make it more
regular and symmetrical looking. But of course when
I made a change at one point it effects changes
elsewhere. I'm not sure how long this part of the
process took, probably about three weeks of
evenings and weekends. It was such exciting work
knowing that it was surely coming together, that
time flew, When I had completed the 'wool' stage I
transferred it to paper and worked my drawing
double full size so it was about five feet
long.
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