Wow. Just wow. These amazing transit maps of early 20th Century Berlin are just a few samples of the maps that can be found at the BerlinerVerkehr website – an absolute treasure trove that transit geeks like me can easily lose hours to. Five stars for this collection, obviously!

All of these maps are of interest, but there’s a few things that really stand out:

• The “Hoch-und Untergrundbahn” logo used on the 1914 and 1918 maps closely echoes the similar “London Underground” logo of the same time period.
• The clearly diagrammatic nature of some of the maps, even as early as 1923 (ten years before Beck’s London Underground diagram!). The 1926 U-Bahn map eschews geography completely, while the 1931 S-Bahn map – with its stylised and perfectly circular Ring Line – looks almost modern in its approach.
• The 1930 Railways and S-Bahn map is actually a historical overview of the history of the network to that date, with colour coding delineating which years certain lines were built in.