1906 Map of Los Angeles Rail Systems

God bless the BigMapBlog, who alerted us today that they've published yet another interesting historical LA map. This one gives some insight into LA's rail transport system at the turn of the century. At that point, LA was an underdeveloped but rapidly growing city, and rail was the dominant form of intra-city transportation. The yellow and red lines on the map show the two main competing streetcar systems, Los Angeles Railway (Yellow Cars) and Pacific Electric Railways (Red Cars). At this point, both systems were only 5 years old. The Yellow Cars carried more daily riders, but the Red Cars extended farther from the downtown hub. At the height of the Yellow Car's operations, the system had 20 streetcar lines and 1,250 trolleys, and served the core of LA in addition to Echo Park, Westlake, Hancock Park, Exposition Park, West Adams, the Crenshaw district, Vernon, Boyle Heights and Lincoln Heights.

To download a massive 14mb image of the map, check out the BigMapBlog's post, which also contain's the author's thoughts on his recent trip to Los Angeles.