I’m old enough to remember when the CTA rail lines were all renamed with colors rather than proper names (presumably for riders so hopelessly illiterate that they can’t read “Ravenswood” but can still recognize a brown stripe). But I do NOT remember how the colors were selected.
Purple makes sense, as the Purple line runs to Northwestern University. And I remember when the schoolchildren voted for Pink. But how about the others? Was there any rhyme or reason to the choices of Red, Brown, Green, Orange, Blue, and Yellow? Am I missing any?..TRM
Good question. I don’t recall any discussion of this at the time. The purple = NU occurred to me also; as you may know the Red line in Boston is supposedly so called because it runs out to Cambridge, home of the Harvard Crimson. The other colors, no idea. I’ll talk with the Master, maybe we’ll call the CTA.
I’ve wondered this myself, and good luck googling it. I would imagine that there was no particular logic- but that is just a guess.
I’ll tell you what though, having the purple line and the brown line run on the same track in the same direction is bad for addlepated people like me. I confuse those colors with great regularity.
My memory from talking to the guys involved, who first put colors on the (strikingly all-black) RTA map of 1977: The logic was fairly simple. Red and Blue were obvious choices for the main lines with downtown subways. Green for the third major line, which at the time was Lake-Dan Ryan. They chose Brown for Evanston and Purple for Ravenswood, a choice that would later be reversed by CTA in its first color map (1985). And the last clear-cut possibility, Orange for Skokie, which would be redeployed for the new Midway line in 1993.