End of the Line


This map aims to include at least one place that the Doctor or companions visited in each story. Places aren't included if
  • they don't have names, or at least not names of the sort that a station might have. I couldn't see 'UNIT HQ' as a station name for example
  • another place from the same story had already been included, and there wasn't any more room when the need to fit in other stories was taken into account. A good example is the omission of the return to The Moon from the Invasion stations - it would make that part of the map look horribly complicated without actually expanding the list of places visited. (And the TARDIS doesn't actually land on the moon in The Invasion anyway...). The tight loop back to Nerva in season 12 caused me enough problems as it is.
I've stuck fairly rigidly to the tube map conventions - all curves are regulation radius and there are no angles other than 45 or 90 degrees. I've even applied that rule to the angle of the links between interchanges - many of the older maps aren't so strict in that regard.

There are some features on this map that don't occur on the real thing - like lines crossing themselves, joining themselves at intersections or running parallel to themselves - but neither are they ruled out by the style guides.

The station names are a little smaller in relation to the line widths than they are on the modern maps, to make the map fit handily on a typical monitor.

There isn't a decent knock-off version of the Johnston font used in the actual map, so I used Transport, the UK road sign font, instead, as it's quite close and quite pleasing. (Trebuchet MS is quite a good approximation to the most recent version of the map font, too).

The bit that I'm least happy with is the link to the westernmost Gallifrey circle, which is much longer even than the Monument-Bank interchange used to be before the Central Line was deflected south. But I can't see a way round it without using a non-standard angle for the line.

The map derives from approximately 650 lines of descriptive code which is then processed by a fairly hefty (88K) Perl script, which outputs an SVG file.

This image is a screen shot of Firefox's rendering of the SVG file - doing it this way helps conceal most of the white gaps that the Firefox rendering engine incorrectly places between line segments. Inkscape and Opera are a bit better in this regard but not perfect. This method also means that the viewer needn't have the Transport font installed.

I was originally going to call the map 'The Great Journey' but then I remembered the the dystopian 1981 DWM strip End of the Line.


(Acknowledgement: The aeroplane glyph is adapted from the airport symbol on Wikimedia Commons, and the rail symbol also comes from there.)

The most recent version of End of the Line is kept on this page. Last update: 2010 Nov 3 - stations for Pyramids of Mars and Android Invasion were in wrong order - fixed.