We are pleased to announce the grand reopening of the website – codename Operation Phoenix – in a classic, newspaper format. It looks and works great on tablets!
While the new site may look vintage, it’s packed with powerful features. The Key to Lines – designed to evoke an old transit atlas — provides clear visibility of active and inactive rail corridors.
When Terminal Station opened its doors as a rail hub in 1905, it served as the convergence point for every major line threading through the South. This website aims to honor that legacy — not just for the active MARTA lines running today, but for the full network of rail corridors, branch lines, and abandoned rights-of-way that once made Atlanta the Gate City of the South.
A Complete Georgia Rail Network
The map previously included a handful of CSX and Norfolk Southern corridors focused only on metropolitan Atlanta. Version 4.0 replaced that dataset with a comprehensive import from OpenStreetMap covering the entire state of Georgia — every named CSX and Norfolk Southern route relation in the OSM database.
The result is 72 freight corridors: 33 CSX subdivisions and districts, 38 Norfolk Southern districts, and the Atlanta BeltLine. Lines now extend from the Alabama state line to the Georgia coast, from the Tennessee border to the Florida approaches — radiating outward from the Terminal Station anchor point just as they did a century ago.
A Simpler, Cleaner Map
With the full rail network added, the planned extension overlays for MARTA — elevated rail routes to Newnan, Peachtree City, Covington, Gainesville, Griffin, and more — can now be neatly redrawn in dashed lines with lineOffset.
For now, the map now focuses on what is verifiable: four active MARTA lines, the Atlanta BeltLine (under construction), and 72 freight corridors. The legend was reorganized accordingly — Active Lines, BeltLine, Freight — and the station count was simplified to reflect only operating stations and the Terminal Station landmark.
The Douglas–Peucker algorithm smooths polyline curves and gives the map a more “transit” feel.
Technical Fixes
This update included rewriting the route-processing pipeline to properly handle OpenStreetMap’s MultiLineString geometry format, which represents corridors with gaps, yard throats, and branch junctions as separate coordinate segments within a single named route. An earlier version of this processing joined those segments blindly, which made for some fun phantom diagonal lines across the map. The corrected approach stitches segments by endpoint proximity, then stores each corridor’s disconnected pieces together under a single route key.
A rendering issue was resolved by normalizing all route data to a single coordinate format. The map engine had been handling two different internal formats — coords for single-segment routes and segments for multi-part routes — with separate code paths that could diverge. All 76 routes now use the segments array format consistently, eliminating the dual-path logic entirely.
tl;dr – It helps render map quickly on mobile phones and tablets.
Design Updates
Extra! Read all about it! Keeping with the newspaper theme, a banner was added for posts marked Sticky. The typeface — UnifrakturCook, the same blackletter used in the masthead — now runs at up to 110 pixels, making the Sticky post alert more prominent than the site masthead. Much like a breaking headline! The banner’s background is now transparent, allowing the aged newsprint texture of the page to show through.
Dark mode has been also added. The palette reads like old newsprint in candlelight: very dark warm paper (#1C1A13), cream ink (#E6DCC6), with a muted crimson accent. The setting respects your system preference automatically and saves when you return to the site. Look for the ☾ or ☀ icons in the masthead to toggle modes at any time. The interactive rail map also switches between MapKit’s light and dark color schemes to match.
Key to Lines is now updated to reflect MARTA, BeltLine, and freight corridors.
Next Updates
- MARTA RESTful API integration.
- Redraw extensions along freight lines with
lineOffset. - A spatial Look Around view for historic depots such as Road To Tara Museum, Stone Mountain Welcome Center, etc.
- State / Congressional Office information via Google Civic Information API.
