About

Imagine One Day Having This Train Map refers to a June 2020 tweet that shared a hypothetical world transit map featuring long train lines connecting cities around the world. The map, initially created for the cover of Mark Ovenden's "Transit Maps of the World," was mocked online for being impractical and nonsensical. Tweets began using the phrase "Imagine one day having this train map" to share parodies of the original tweet.

Origin

On June 17th, 2020, Twitter user @daveloach2^[1] tweeted a world transit map with the caption, "imagine one day having this train map" (shown below). The tweet gained over 84,800 likes and 26,700 retweets in two days.

Spread

On June 18th, 2020, Twitter user and author @markovenden^[2] tweeted, "Cheers to the 'master of satire' for tweeting my map. It was a playful way to illustrate the cities with Metro-type transit systems for my book on the subject" with a link to his 2015 book "Transit Maps of the World"^[6] (shown below, left). The tweet received over 1,100 likes and 230 retweets in a day. That same day, Twitter user @johnlk_80^[3] responded to the original tweet with images of what the train lines would look like in on Google Earth (shown below, right). The tweet garnered over 1,600 likes and 140 retweets in a day.

On June 18th, Twitter user @Desmostylian proposed that "A more realistic version of this map would have every country filled with rail networks, except for the US, which would just have a giant picture of a car and a middle finger slapped across it" to which Twitter user @ChippixOfficial^[4] responded with an illustration of his proposal (shown below, left). The tweet gained 7,300 likes and 240 retweets in a day. That same day, many Twitter users began to create parodies of the original post. For example, Twitter user @bicknaker^[5] posted a Berlin closeup parody with the caption, "imagine one day having this train map" and received over 26,800 likes and 3,500 retweets in a day. On June 19th, a Twitter^[7] "events" page was created.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References