Viral fantasy railway map for Nairobi

[John Ashworth]

How I designed viral fantasy railway map for Nairobi, without being to Kenya

I currently live in New York City, and I'm 24 years old. I've loved trains for as long as I can remember, and I've been making fantasy maps ever since I was eleven years old, when I visited Europe and saw trains absolutely everywhere—it was nothing like the almost-nonexistent train system at home in the United States... In designing my map of Kenya Railways, I was fascinated by the history of the meter-gauge network and the new Standard Gauge Railroad. But what stood out to me was that the lines of the Nairobi Commuter Rail network were short, had only a few stops, and only operated a few times a day. This was different from most of the systems I'd seen elsewhere in the world: usually, lines with infrequent service and spread-out stops would go considerably further from the city center, while short lines that stayed mostly within a city would have frequent service and lots of stops close together. So the way I saw it, Nairobi was using commuter rail to do a metro's job, and its current network wasn't serving the needs of the citizens. This was remarkable to me since I knew most people in Nairobi didn't have cars. And that's what raised the question: what if Nairobi had an actual metro, with frequent stops and frequent service? Where would the lines go? Almost on a whim, I decided to try making a fantasy map, just like the maps I'd made since I was eleven...