Daylight Express Service Map

Description:

The Daylight Express is California’s premiere rail service, providing nearly every major city of the Golden State with access to fast, reliable high speed rail service to the rest of the state and beyond. Daylight Express reaches 25 cities in California, including the metropolises of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and San Diego.

Daylight trains are separated into three tiers of service: Sequoia, Redwood, and Daylight.

Sequoia - Local Service: The most comprehensive service operating on the system, providing service to every station and city.

Redwood - Limited Express Service: The expedited service providing speedy connections to major hubs and cities in the state.

Daylight - Super Express Service: The premiere fast service, operating trains exclusively between the metropolises that drive California.

Idea:

At the time of this writing, California has been in the process of constructing a statewide high speed rail system that would link Northern California and Southern California. While only the first phase of the system between San Francisco and Los Angeles is currently under construction, the full build-out of the HSR system would include a network linking the major cities of the state with each other. This would include a segment down to San Diego and up to Sacramento in second phase.

The California High Speed Rail authority is in charge of bringing the system to fruition and it is believed the line would be operated by a third-party operator; most likely a consortia of private companies in a public-private partnership.

The map you see above is an interpretation of what that operator might look like. Since a very young age, I had been deeply invested in the project and huge supporter of it. I even made a feature-length documentary talking about the initiative in high school.

More recently, I’ve been interested in the future branding and marketing of what California’s future high speed system would look like.

My intention is create a whole series of pieces based around this brand concept, starting with the service map. Eventually, I want to have a whole ‘ecosystem’ of content revolving around the Daylight brand as well as any tangential piece related to it.

Process:

Maps and data of the proposed system were widely available online. They showed the full system, including both phases one and two. I used the data available to build my own version of the map using Adobe Illustrator. Prior to creating the map, I needed to establish a logo and brand from which to base the map around. After some thought, I decided on ‘Daylight’.

Why Daylight? The Daylight Limited, and later Coast Daylight, was the name of Southern Pacific Railroad’s rail service from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The storied train ran regular passenger service on the line with a bright brilliant livery of red, orange, and black. During its operational history from 1937 to 1974, the train was widely popular and iconic; advertised as “the most beautiful train in the world”.

Reviving the Daylight brand and modernizing it could be a major boon for the California High Speed Rail Authority as it seeks to find an operator for the fledgling system. The Daylight is synonymous with California and having the historical rail service be the name of the HSR system would be the perfect implementation of the future of travel in the state.

I used the original Daylight logo as inspiration and built the color scheme from there. The naming of the tiered service was inspired by the Japanese Shinkansen system, which uses names for each level of service for their bullet trains. I wanted a slight theme for the service that reflected the spirit and culture of California and eventually settled on trees, with Sequoia being the local service and Redwood being the semi-fast service. The Daylight name itself was reserved for the fastest service to enhance the sense of prestige and priority with the name.

With time, I hope to release more ephemera related to this brand concept as well as some related piece that would fit in with the possible future of mobility in California.