I am very excited that you can now just click order on this website, and every map I send to production makes me smile. It has been a fairly long journey getting to this point — and hopefully, the project still has a longer journey ahead of itself. I want to use this blog post to tell the story of Drawn to Travel in a bit more detail
The story of Drawn to Travel goes back to 2021. Throughout the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was reminiscing about the beautiful train journeys I had taken in the years before. I thought to myself that it would be really cool to memorialise them on my wall.
I searched the market for maps of the European rail networks, but couldn’t find what I was looking for: a beautiful, yet complete map of the entire continent. There were some, but they looked very much like a road atlas. And I believe train travel is way more poetic than that.
So I took to the internet to search for data to build my own. I was lucky, quickly finding that the people at OpenStreetMap are as diligent mapping rail tracks as they are with any other piece of infrastructure and the natural environment. I was able to produce the first prototype.
While was a nice proof of concept, I realised that it won’t be super useful for the purpose intended: tracking my journeys across Europe. The lines were too dense. Too jittery. And too much like tangled-up Spaghetti. I knew the data would need some serious cleaning and design work to become useful.
As I was finishing up my dissertation, writing about public discourse concerning the climate crisis, I had to postpone work on the map for a while. After obtaining my degree I let myself get drawn into working at a major research university, and all but forgot about the map.
But after a little while of doing more research, the project came back to me, and it wouldn’t let me go anymore. In late 2023, I started work on the maps in earnest, developing the code needed to make them true pieces of art. In a future post I will write a bit more about all the steps involved.
Next to some fairly intense coding and design work, I started to think about how to turn this idea into an actual business. Part of me never wanted to do this, feeling content that I had made something beautiful for myself. But I realised that I hoped that I could inspire others with it.
I’ve learned quite a lot about printing techniques, about branding and marketing, and about how difficult it can be to maintain a steady presence on social media. It is still the part of the work that I find most taxing, noticing the mental health impacts it can have. Luckily, I have support in that area.
With the first products ready to order, I feel committed to trying to make Drawn to Travel a commercial success as well. It’s been a passion project throughout the past years, and always will be. But I do believe in the beauty of train travel, and in the beauty of what I have created. And I think it’s worth sharing that with the world.
