Hello, new to this forum!

I registered here to learn how to make maps. I will freely admit to being a novice when it comes to computer graphics, but I’m usually a fairly quick learner. With maps in general I am anything but a novice however, have been drawing maps with pens and paper since my childhood (I even built my own large transparent drawing board as a teenager), but I slowly have come to realize that I will need to go digital in order to keep up with the times.

History is among my greatest interests, and I often have reason to try and make maps depicting a specific place during different eras. I also happen to be a huge rail fan, and one project that I have become loosely involved in is trying to create a historical rail atlas of sorts. This would be in the form of a series of maps showing the evolving rail network of a specific country in ten year intervals (the general idea is to have one map of 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900 etc.).

This means we (I’m not alone in this) will have to produce maps that mainly consist of lines, whereas they won’t require super detailed landscape relief. Basically only coast lines, lakes, navigable rivers and canals are necessary as far as landscape features are concerned. The basic background can be white or possibly light yellowish, maybe with some depiction of mountainous terrain and some other very basic features (but nothing like built up areas since they vary too much over time and it would be too complex to recreate the exact urban sprawl for different decades). Other than that the rail lines will be the focus in the form of solid, dashed or pointed lines in a range of different colours (to separate type, gauge, ownership, relative importance etc.). While this may not require extremely high resolution, we do intend to make maps that are of good enough quality that we may eventually be able to print them.

For this purpose (as well as a few other similar projects) I’m looking for suitable map making software. As I said I’m a pretty quick learner, but I won’t have the ability to spend all my time on learning the most challenging and sophisticated programs. (Although free software is always nice I’m willing to pay up to perhaps around 800-1000USD for a good program.)

I have already noticed there are some tutorials on here that seem interesting enough, but so far I'm not exactly sure of what might be the most useful tools for me. So if you guys know of a both easy-to-use and powerful map making computer program, I’d be most grateful for any advice!

M J