The Making of TrianRail
From Vision to Finalized
Initial Mapping
Before this map was born, I thought of making a railfan guide map as seen in White River Production's Trains and Railroads of The Past magazine, but a little bit better than what the person behind the maps did with a little bit of Rand McNally. However, the specifications of the assignment was to have icons depicting locations, so I had to shrink my scope. While coming up with the project, I thought of the recent GoTriangle proposal to do commuter rail between Durham and Clayton and came up with a sprawling network of commuter lines, and thus, the stepping stones of TrianRail was established.
Reworkings In Progress
As time progressed, so does opinions of your first attempt of it.For starters, I wasn't a fan of the obliged icons that depicts certain stations, they didn't feel like a map commuters would use to get from to place and instead a tourist map for some theme park. Then, the major highways didn't have icons to tell what they are in context to location because they were sidelined in favor of the location icons.
However, I was given an opportunity to rework the map to what I envisioned in the first place. To rework the concept, I decided to rename the system to TrianRail rather than RailNC, change the pallet from green to blue and design a proposed trainset for the services.
The Mockup and The Mascot
Searching for a decent train Photoshop mockup that isn't European, an subway, drawn nor payware was impossible to find, so I decided to photoshop an actual locomotive into the TrianRail scheme. I found a public domain image of a Budd RDC on Wikimedia and went into the program and got to work redesigning it into an TrianRail scheme.
Then I went into Illustrator and drew out the RDC as seen in the map, advertisements, and timetables similar to how Amtrak had their F40PH's as the poster engine. It wasn't meant to be the actual unit, but more or less a "mascot" to the system.
TrianRail Today
Modifying the map to my vision was easy as I replaced elements that I didn't like in favor of elements that was necessary. The monorail from the RailNC days was axed, as did the destination icons. However, there were some additions and updates. For example, icons representing major highways were added, the JoCo line was promoted to mainline width, as well as under the hood improvements.
