Beijing Subway Line 8 has been temporarily closed. The current four-station line runs from Beitucheng through the Olympic Green to
South Gate of Forest Park. Don't panic, the reason for the closure is the impending opening of Line 8, phase 2! The second phase, scheduled to open in late December, will extend the line to the north, with additional interchanges with the Changping Line and Line 13. The full list of new stations is listed below.
An update for our Explore Singapore MRT map is now available on the iTunes App Store. It's a free update for all users who have purchased the app in the past! Our online map www.exploresg.com has also been updated with the new stations.
Note this is a beta release - we don't yet have some information for the new stations, such as first/last train times and journey costs. We'll provide a new update as soon as we get this information added.
Happy Mid-Autumn festival to all ExploreMetro fans! Here's a special holiday treat for you metro-lovers. We've made an anagrammed version of the 2011 Shanghai Metro map, scrambling the letters of the English names of all stations for comic effect.
Click below for the full PDF metro map, here are some of our favorites:
Haha, brainy girls = Shanghai Library
Huge Shoe healing Communist Ascendancy = Shanghai Science and Technology Museum
Mouse came up arse = Aerospace Museum
Odd anagram = Madang Road
Back in 2008 I created the first anagrammed map of the Shanghai Metro. Since then the Shanghai Metro has added lots of new stations and lines and is now the longest metro system in the world, so I thought it was about time to bring the anagram map up to date!
Note for pedants: I used the common English name of the station as posted on signboards, spelling out directions e.g. South Lingyan Road. For some challenging stations (particularly the ones with lots of Xs and Zs I added "station" e.g. Dongjing Station -> Standing, I jog not.)
We need your help! We’re planning to add Pinyin names to our metro maps to help you pronounce metro station names more easily. After your great help on the Shanghai names, we need your help to check the accuracy of the Beijing Subway transliterations. Take a look over the list of Beijing Subway stations below, and if you see any errors in the pinyin column, leave us a comment! In particular: * Do all syllables have the correct pinyin, including tone mark? * Are the word boundaries correct? The Beijing Subway tends to run multiple words together in Pinyin. We've tried to use more logical word breaks where possible.
We're working on a useful new feature for our iPhone apps which we think you'll find really useful.
When you tap to hear the audio pronunciation for a station, you'll also see the Pinyin for the station name, complete with tone marks. This is really handy for stations with alternative English names, for example:
We're celebrating Seoul Week on ExploreMetro! We've teamed up with Seoul Sub→urban to bring you stories and pictures from around Seoul. Every day this week we'll bring you one of their profiles of a Seoul Subway station, today it's Bulgwang (불광역) .
One of the first things you’ll probably notice when you exit Bulgwang Station is that the air is just a little bit more breathable here than in other parts of Seoul, and being so close to the edge of the city and to the mountains that makes sense. The most dominating feature of the neighborhood is Bukhan Mountain (북한산), especially nearby Suri Peak (수리봉), rising up northeast of the station, though the hulking 2001 Outlet/Kim’s Club/CGV building attached to Exit 6 is trying its best to change that.
Across the street from that building is what looks – with its gunmetal gray exterior, roof curved at just the right height and angle, and bare bulbs visible through the windows – like an old-fashioned passenger train. What it actually is, is Jeil Market (제일시장) just steps from Exit 7. We’ve gotten to the point in this project where our usual reaction is, ‘Oh. Another market,’ because in all honesty there’s often not much that differentiates one neighborhood market from the next (and there are a lot more in the city than I ever expected), and after a while you start running out of new things to write/photograph. But the Bulgwang market is, frankly, pretty unique.
To begin with, it’s unavoidable. Step out of the exit and just in front of you the sidewalk has been commandeered in a way that would give American zoning regulators fits. Beneath that gray metal and plastic covering, businesses on the inside of the sidewalk extend displays out onto it, and on the sidewalk’s outside smaller vendors have set up stands and tarps. Old women sell plastic bags of kimchi and butchers offer Styrofoam packs of coagulated blood. There are eels, steamed corn, blocks of tofu, and crates of chicken feet on ice. So if you want to walk south from this side of the station, you have to run the gauntlet a little bit, for about three blocks.
After doing so, I turned right into a side street and wandered for a bit through a calm neighborhood of four- or five-story buildings. The occasional breeze disturbed the hot heavy air, but otherwise it was so quiet that I could actually hear the low hum of a barber pole as it spun, and I thought of a guy in the market selling potatoes whose t-shirt just said ‘SLOWNESS.’
We're celebrating 
