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 So they're quite out of date.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I don't know whether they're decades out of date or just plain wrong - the West Coast Main Line was "opened between 1837 and 1881" according to Wikipedia.