The New York Subway Diagram

by Joseph Brennan

The latest version, 5.34,
published August 7, 3023 is a PDF file.

N O T E S

August 2023: FINALLY an update, version 5.34!
Not a subway, but the big news is the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central (or Grand Central Madison) opened. Less exciting, the Airtrains at JFK and EWR have some different stops, the latter because of construction. That's about it.

After a long hiatus, I have some updates in 5.33 :
A new subway transfer from TimesSquare to 42nd St (6th Ave) was provided as part of the shuttle rebuild to two tracks with longer trains. The LIRR has a new station at Elmont. The LIRR to Grand Central is still supposed to open this year, and test trains have run through. I'll believe it when I see it. Once that is open, there is a serious proposal to run trains from Penn to New Rochelle (and farther?) with some station stops in the Bronx, a few years on. Repeating myself, I'll believe it when I see it. Nothing new on the New Jersey side, to which development of a true metropolitan system is still limited by the Hudson River.

The previous few updates:

Older update notes are here. Dig the old-school HTML coding.


If you want to get an idea of the process involved in making this diagram and the obsessions of an amateur graphic designer, think hard about it, and then if you are sure, check my blog for posts named Making a Subway Map starting here in June 2010.

Among other things I wrote about the issue of how much service detail to show on the overall system map. I don't want to repeat all that here, but I'm still thinking about it. That's why the subway letters and numbers showed up in 5.02, and went away in 5.03. For that matter I had never shown the names of the mainline railroad routes. In 5.06 I have again shown the subway letters and numbers, and added also the names of mainline railroad routes.


A portion of the old Subway Diagram features in Mark Ovenden’s book Transit Maps of the World, published by Penguin, October 30, 2007. If you are here looking at my diagram, you’ll probably want to be looking at his book too. The new 2015 edition no longer includes my map, but it's still pretty good.


I created pages about Abandoned Stations back in 2001. They’re getting pretty crusty by now but you still might like them.