Everyday millions of commuters use subways (also called Metro trains) all around the world. In some countries, subways have been working for more than 80 years but in other countries subways are still being constructed. If you plan to visit a new city, then you must check out its subways as this is the fastest and affordable way to travel within a city. The freeware app called qMetro can help you navigate the maps of dozens of cities all around the world.
You can download qMetro from its sourceforge website. The download is a portable application of less than five megabytes in size. You can extract the contents of the downloaded file and run qMetro.exe to launch the application. When it runs for the first time, it shows you the subway map of the New York city in the USA.
If you want to open other maps, then you can select File → Open from the menubar and select one of the PMZ files from the map sub-folder. When the maps are opened, you can zoom-in, zoom-out and fit the maps to the window. But these maps are not ordinary picture maps. These maps are interactive. You can click on a station and mark it as the starting point, then click on another station to mark it as the finish point and qMetro would display the number of routes available between these two stations as well as the time taken by each of the routes. You can also search for a station in the map.
If your city’s Metro map is not available in the map sub-folder, then you can download them from the http://pmetro.su/Maps.html website which hosts the PMZ maps for almost every city in the world. There are over 200 maps available on this site. This website can also be opened from the qMetro menubar. You have to download the map in the ZIP archive format and extract the PMZ file to the map sub-folder of the qMetro application.
You can download qMetro from http://sourceforge.net/projects/qmetro/.