Metro mapping?

[Tyr]

I've just been making a little joke metro/underground/subway map mapping out the thought processes of a friend of mine. Whilst I was making this though a thought hit me.
These metro maps are rather simple things yet here I am drawing lines manually and working out angles and whatot myself.

I wonder from those who may know better; would there exist some kind of program to generate a map for you?

I've been thinking this should be perfectly possible. Just put in the name of your 'stations', their grid reference location and what tracks they are on and then go!
It draws lines between them, spaces/groups them properly when two line colours follow the same route and the like.


My programming skills suck and its not important enough for me to devote time to it but surely I can't be the only one to come to this idea?



Edit- and woops, I made this in the wrong forum

[ravells]

This sort of mapping lends itself well to vector drawing programmes. Here's a metro map I knocked up in a few minutes. You can just drag and drop the stations to make new ones and the lines are pretty easy too.

But if you're looking for a programme, then the only one I can think of is context free (it has a few metro map programmes which are freely downloadable), but you can't control what it does.

[Syt]

I think any drawing program that allows you to "snap to grid" should do fine. For the most part, if you have a square plan, most standardized plans have angles at 45 and 90 degrees. All you have to add is circles/elipses for stations.

Here's how Vienna does it:

[RobA]

It would be an easy go with Inkscape. It supports start, end and mid-node markers to represent stations, and allows arbitrary grids for snapping (including angled).

-Rob A>