One of the most fascinating aspects of old maps is not so much looking at what’s changed since they were made, though that is fascinating enough, but of what might have been but then never was.

Regular readers of this blog may have worked out that out of all the maps there are, my favourite is the London Underground Tube map. A browse through the London Tube Map Archive shows just how much the Tube network has expanded and contracted over the years and how stations have changed not only in name but sometimes in position as well. But some of these maps also show what was planned but which was never realised; as Trent Reznor once put it “all the what abouts, the might have and could have beens“. Take a look at this map of the network from 1938.

The lines marked under contruction are part of what was called the New Works Programme and some of them that are shown on the map did get built. The eastern and western Central Line extensions were completed, though only as far as West Ruislip in the east and not to Denham as planned. The extension of the Bakerloo line from Baker Street to Stanmore was also built and now forms part of today’s Jubilee Line. But the Northern Heights Plan, the criss cross of lines branching off from the Northern Line never reached completion. The extension north of Edgware, the link between Edgware and Mill Hill East to Finchley and the extension to Alexandra Palace from Finsbury Park via Highgate were all finally dropped in 1954.

There’s a strange parallel between 1939′s Tube map and one produced by Transport For London in 2004, showing how the map would look in 2016. A scaled down version of Crossrail is currently being tunneled underneath central London, but there’s no sign yet of the Cross River Transit linking Brixton and Peckham with Camden, nor is there any sign of the West London Transit linking Shepherds Bush with Uxbridge via Ealing Broadway. Heathrow Terminal 5 on the Piccadilly Line was built and now links to Paddington but as part of the Heathrow Express and not Crossrail and there’s no sign of the Metropolitan Line linking Watford and Watford Junction.

As a closing note which will probably be only of interest to my Teddington readers (Hi Ed !!), a branch of Crossrail was also planned to start at Kingston and link with the main Crossrail route somewhere west of today’s Ladbroke Grove station, taking in Teddington, Twickenham and Richmond along the way. In the light of today’s spending cuts and economic climate, it sadly looks like the scope of the network envisaged back in 2004 will never be fully realised, consigning 2004′s map of the Underground network to the same level of historical curiosity that 1938′s map has today.

Next, take a classic, 1980′s movie which appeals to both the scifi fan and the computer nerd in you and classifies as a guilty pleasure as an added bonus. Disney’s 1981 Tron fits the bill here.

Add the ingredients, mix well and serve. The end results might just look like Kevin Flynn’s version of the London Underground network on The Grid.

To paraphrase Kevin Flynn (the Tron character not the artist) … “Who’s that guy?“, “That’s Tron. He fights for the Tube Users“.

For Londoners this will probably come as no surprise, but this time around, the BBC are crowd-sourcing a map of station closures, services affected and the knock on impact to other forms of London public transport, using publicly submitted reports and media in addition to reporters on the street. It seems natural enough that this will be visualised on a map and in tonight’s BBC London News, it was plainly evident that the BBC are using OpenStreetMap as the underlying map tiles for the visualisation.

You can see a snapshot of how the map looks, taken a few minutes ago; head over to the London Tube Strike Map for more updates as the strike starts to affect London.

Owing to overwhelming demand by apps that use the service, the London Underground feed has had to be temporarily suspended. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible but this may take some days. We will keep everyone informed of progress towards a resolution.

In the meantime, if you want to see how it does looks when the API is up and running there’s a video clip of Matthew Somerville’s recent Science Day hack visualisation over on my Flickr photo and video stream.

I assert that train operators know where their assets are; it would be irresponsible if they didn’t

Whilst the plethora of train operators that fragmented from the ashes of the old British Rail network haven’t answered this challenge yet, Transport for London has, opening up just such data as part of the London Datastore API. In today’s age of talented web mashup developers, if you release an API people will build things with it if the information is useful and interesting and that’s just what Matthew Somerville of MySociety did at the recent Science Hack Day … a (near) realtime map of the London Underground showing the movement of trains of all of the Tube lines. A screen grab wouldn’t do it justice and it takes a while to load, so a video grab might help here.

Coming down the escalators at Waterloo and want to know whether to head for the Bakerloo or the Northern Line to take you north of the river? Now you can tell which line has a northbound train closest to Waterloo.

Want to see just how close the gap is between Leicester Square and Covent Garden on the Piccadilly Line really is? Now you can.

Of course, this doesn’t solve every problem …

1. If you’re on the escalators at Waterloo how do you get 3G data coverage to view this mashup on your phone as Transport for London still haven’t manage to achieve cellular coverage underground, unlike Amsterdam, Berlin and other cities?
2. The site will probably be the target of a tutting campaign from the Health and Safely police insisting that such a visualisation will cause people to run for the train and of course, they might trip and hurt themselves.
3. If you’re at the top of the escalator and the train is in the station, now, right this very minute now, how do you get down to the platforms quickly?

Whilst I can’t answer the first two of these questions, this publicity stunt from Volkswagon at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station might just hold the solution for the third question … a slide!

It’s all very geotastic …

One of the themes that threads through both the BBC4 series is that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. Nowhere could this be more ably demonstrated in some of the bookmarks that have been appearing in my delicious stream over the past year or two …

First in this occasional series is the Tourist Tube Map. It’s the iconic, Harry Beck, design of the London Underground map. Or is it?

Some of those stations don’t look like they’re in the right place … and can you really get free admission to the Elephant and Castle?

Here’s a good use case for his proposed solution … wheresmytrain …

Piccadilly Circus Tube station, Bakerloo Line southbound platform, round about 5.00 PM. The dot matrix displays tell us … that a train is “held” somewhere but with no information as to what this means. The platform announcer tells us “the Bakerloo Line is currently suspended” and immediately afterwards the “control room” tells us that “a good service is currently running on all London Underground lines“.

One is these statements should be correct, the other two should not be. By means of resolution, an Elephant and Castle train turned up 2 minutes after all of this has occurred, making all three of the above statements erroneous.

• Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world … mwah hah hah hah.
• A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow “harp” logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
• The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
• Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen “that’s not right” when watching a film? You’re not alone.
• Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
• Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
• Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
• You’ve probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
• If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

• Illustrating just how broken the mobile operator’s customer support is, Rummble’s CEO Andrew Scott details his 9 month battle with O2 after they refused to honour an agreed deal and MoanLog’s Gaurav Patel details the extraordinary length that 3 went to so they didn’t have to give out a PAC code to a customer.
• Twitter was brought down by a distributed denial of service attack; but some people survived thanks to a PostIt note.
• Chiswick Business Park knows how to speak to humans and to dogs.
• The world didn’t end at 12:34:56 on 07/08/09; probably because it had already happened in July to the US.
• The Londoner and the geo geek in me took a trip down memory lane with a collection of London Underground Tube maps.
• And finally, thanks to MobilePress, vicchi.org went mobile.