Despite living quite near the Thames Valley I don't really know anything about it - what makes the borders, railways, etc. on islander's map random/bad?
Well here's the map of the Thames area:
Firstly - the river. The Thames goes clearly from east to west, from London to Oxford and beyond. But on the map for some reason the map follows the tributary of the River Thame and ignores the Thames going into Oxford (sorry,
Europa). There's no reason for this, especaily since it somehow ignores the river that goes through the new capital city.
Then there's the cities. Translating Reading as
Readville is just stupid, though at least it's not Lecture. Then there's the totally new city called
Mue, which is somehow big enough to be on the main railway line, and yet there is nothing like a large town on the Thames there. Alex's argument that it's a stupid translation of Slough may well be right, but if it's Slough then it's moved several miles north. Didcot was for most of its history a tiny village with a few hundred people, and certainly at the time of the PoD was nothing special. On the other hand it did grow to a reasonable amount of importance it has today because it was the sight of the Oxford branch of the Great Western which it clearly is in this map, so it could have grown in importance because of that as it did in OTL. That's just making excuses though. Plus Didcot doesn't get translated to something stupid in French like
Did-lit d'enfant, I'm disappointed
.
Speaking of the railway, it does sort of annoy me that it randomly crosses the river twice between the two cities, though the real Great Western line does do that west of Reading so it's not impossible. There's a very clear divergence at Didcot with there not being the main line east-west and instead they both curve north to Oxford. Though it is the capital in OTL, so again it could work. I would imagine there being a much straighter main line between London and Oxford in TTL.
Finally there's the borders. Most of them are clearly drawn completely at random (Bristol losing access to the sea is particularly hilarious), and that's clearly visible around the Thames - the Winchester/Centre/Harlowe boundary doesn’t follow the river at all and was probably drawn without any reference to it. I mean the Harlowe boundary crosses the Thames/Thame five times, for no discernible reason. Above all that's a really simple thing to fix
