Loren Petrich's Railroad-Yard Page

I call it that because a railroad yard is a home for trains, and trains is what this page is all about. Urban and suburban trains at least.

Back when the Internet was smaller, these maps were drawn from various published sources, such as various schedules, the former Light Rail Annual (published by the publishers of the formerPassenger Train Journal; its publishers have been acquired by Pentrex, Inc., producer of railroad videos), and the former The New Electric Railway Journal. However, there are now an abundance of Internet rail-transit resources, which include transit-system sites; I list some of them in Tracks to Elsewhere.

They are all drawn with various degrees of stylization, some of them are rather sketchy, not including all the stations stopped at. Also, the water parts are often hand-drawn, and I'm not the best freehand drawer in the world. I have thought of copying the water depictions from DeLorme's excellent Street Atlas USA, but a reading of the fine print of its software license has not convinced me that it would be OK to do so (I am not very much of a lawyer). I have no official connections with any transit agency whatsoever, and the responsibility for the contents of these maps is totally mine. Any copyright I may claim on these documents is not intended to infringe on the copyrights of others, such as transit agencies on their logos; the copyright is only on the rendition.

Track Maps

 Here are some track diagrams of some Bay Area rail-transit systems' tracks. I created my original set of them, for BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), because some of its trackage is rather complicated and nontrivial. I have since created diagrams of the San Francisco Muni Metro and the San Jose LRT tracks, which also share these properties. All these track maps were created from notes I had made from personal observation of these tracks; I have no "official" track maps. I only have the revenue-service tracks, and not the yard tracks, since the latter are rather difficult for me to observe given the vantage points available to me.

Most of thse diagrams use the convention that some central point or junction is at the top left of the diagram, and that going outward is going rightward, then down a line, then rightward again, in the fashion of most Roman-alphabet text, such as this text. The main exceptions are the central points themselves, such as downtown Oakland for BART and downtown SJ for its LRT. For the Muni Metro, I've used the Embarcadero Market-Street station as its central point.

Here they are:

Other San Francisco Bay Rail Maps

 Here are some more that I've drawn, not only of BART, but also of the other rail systems in the Bay Area, including some historical and hypothetical ones.

Rail Maps of Other Places

 All of these files were created with Aldus (now Adobe) SuperPaint and turned into GIFs with Equilibrium's DeBabelizer. They are in this stylized form and compressed with GIF to save on file bulk, and also to be readily viewable; SuperPaint and PICT are Macintosh-only, while GIF viewers are available for just about anything that can make color displays. However, I have upgraded to MacOS X, so these programs must be run in Classic; I may eventually end up using OSX-native substitutes for them.

I may create rail-transit maps for other areas, and I will create updated versions of the map files here as appropriate, such as when extensions open.

Some Rail Writings

 Here are some things I've written about rail-related subjects. I have HTMLified some of my writings, since that would be what is most appropriate for their contents. All of them are for the San Francisco Bay Area unless otherwise noted. Here they are:

Tracks to Elsewhere

 And last, but not least, here are some virtual tracks to elsewhere. There are so many that I've classified them by region -- four north-south strips of the US, with the locations in north-to-south order.

Official Sites:

Unofficial, Fan, and Advocacy Sites: