So far I have been trying to study NYC's subway system one station at a time. Now that I have collected some twenty plus stations, I figure it's time I zoom out and look at how the stations relate to one another. When I put all the individual stations where they belong on the map, it looks like this:
Lower Half of Manhattan in Aerial View
It gets tricky when I try to connect the dots - the tracks are really a vast network that gets interwoven together with a lot of ups and downs. Tracks that are parallel in one station sometimes get stacked on top of each other in another. They also split and merge, from local to express, and from inner to outer tracks. Here is my first attempt at figuring out the Columbus Circle area:
First Attempt at Sketching Tracks between Stations
Luckily nycsubway.org has a wealth of information to help me out. It has track maps that show which track is above which, like this:
Source: http://www.nycsubway.org/perl/caption.pl?/img/trackmap/detail-cityhall.png