Train Color Lines

Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the CTA adopting its color-coded rail line system. The change happened on February 21, 1993, when the agency decided that instead of using streets or names for the lines, it would use a color designation, hence the birth of the Blue Line, Red Line, Green Line, and so forth. This graph only includes major heavy rail (such as a metro or subway), light rail, commuter rail, streetcar, and bus rapid-transit lines in the United States.

From Montreal, Quebec to Casper, Wyoming, there are countless other examples where transit systems use colors for nomenclature. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) today marked the 25th anniversary of when CTA converted the names of its rail lines to a color. Colors were sampled from official rapid transit diagrams* of every system in the world and charted in several ways to explore how each city has used them to color code each line or service.

Rapid transit systems include subways, metros, undergrounds, railways, etc. operating frequently in urban areas. Did you know that the NYC subway lines are marked by 10 Pantone® spot colors? Even E.

The CTA adopted its current, color-coded system of train lines only in 1993, and the colors riders know so well today reached their recognizable state only in 2006. These colors were rescued from the currently unavailable 3dtrains.com website. Using letters, numbers, and colors is about as easy as it gets.

We're introducing letters for these lines, and numbers to refer to their services. For example, the Broad Street Line [B] is the B, while the local train is the B1. CTA has officially dropped the use of its traditional line names in favor of the new color names.

Roller signs on the cars traditionally had indicated the route name, without indicating the actual direction. But newer roller signs would simply indicate the color and actual destination. In recent years, CTA has moved away from traditional mechanical roller signs to digital signs.

'Red Line wasn't always red?' How the CTA trains got their colors The color lines of Chicago's trains may be iconic, but they're more recent than you might think.