An official atlas of North Korea

Since no one else has noted it: they show rail lines and only rail. No roads on those maps. This includes some quite obscure ones like the railway between Labrador and Sept-Iles, Quebec. (It has almost no traffic and it serves a small town and a mine and it's not connected to the rest of the North American system.) Similarly they depict sections of rail in Canada that were out of service many years before this map was published. So they're quite out of date. To not show that Canada is linked by rail with the USA at Detroit is a definite oversight, too.

Seeing through the lens of railroads is probably an artifact of both ideology and the economic reality in North Korea. And maybe also the implicitly military purpose of these maps.

I thought that too, but the map for the UK is very weird - there is no direct connection between what looks like Birmingham and what looks like Manchester or anywhere in the North West of England. So, no West Coast Main Line? Instead they have the rail line veering off towards the peak district.

I don't know whether they're decades out of date or just plain wrong - the West Coast Main Line was "opened between 1837 and 1881" according to Wikipedia.

> No roads on those maps. This includes some quite obscure ones like the railway between Labrador and Sept-Iles, Quebec.

I guess the maps are old, because they show the Newfoundland Railway, which was removed in the 80s.

Also the UK seems to include the Grand Union canal and River Severn but not the River Thames. It seems quite random.

Yes,I noticed Kansas City is prominently featured on all the maps, which makes sense for rail hubs.

But strange, then, that the north/south line (Kansas City Southern / Canadian Pacific) is not there.

Hmm, if those red lines are meant to be rail lines than someone's definitely made some errors. E.g. the Europe map shows a red line in Iceland, perhaps between Reykjavík and Akureyri. But there's no railway between Reykjavík and Akureyri and in fact there's no rail in Iceland at all.

I just assumed the red lines were "major routes" of some sort, maybe rail, maybe roads.

There's the San Bernardino Museum located at the train station in SB. Its next to the ATSF yards, so its sort of a combined SB and ATSF museum. On the wall there was a map of the US with all sorts of lines on it.

Under closer scrutiny, all of the lines were railroads, and not highways. In fact, (I don't think) there were no highways at all. And it was all railroads, not just ATSF. I don't recall the date on the map.

Just a fascinating "other view" of the world to look at the US through that lens.

You can look at https://openrailwaymap.org/ for an up-to-date rail-only map of the world.

Note it's infrastructure: lines may be freight-only, or only used occasionally.

https://www.xn--pnvkarte-m4a.de/ is an equivalent for public transport routes.

For Australia, at least, the rail lines are shown in red and major roads are shown in maroon. The lines for the roads are mostly thinner than for the rail, but not consistently so. At first glance, it's difficult to determine which lines are road and rail, unless you already know which is which.

> So they're quite out of date.

"More specifically, it is an electronic edition published on CD in the first decade of the 2000s"

So no telling when the data was actually gathered/acquired before being "frozen" for publication.

Also, if this is on something released to the NK public, then I'd imagine they are highly sanitized to make the rest of the world less impressive to those NK citizens that are allowed access to it. I'd strongly hope they provide their military better information, yet we know militaries are often lied to by their command.

Doesn't have the Northern Transcon, either, which is an important rail link right along the Canadian border:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Transcon

The Northern Transcon is the northernmost route in the west:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BNSF_Railway_system_map.s...

My grandfather built that railway in a supervisor capacity in Labrador. My dad was born in sept illes because of it. It was once very important but now a footnote. It moved iron ore in the 60s / 70s

> To not show that Canada is linked by rail with the USA at Detroit is a definite oversight, too.

I don't think that was an oversight.

Australian roads are also out of whack.

Then again, they could as well draw "here be dragons", it's not that anyone would ever actually do anything using these maps.

You can examine their modern military maps; there's many of them (staged) in backgrounds of random KCNA photos. I.e. this "big board",

https://www.rferl.org/a/korea-evacuation-kim-/24951984.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/who-north-koreas-secretiv...

I don't know why one wouldn't expect their military to have modern cartography, in the internet era.

At least the political maps are post-1992.