This is only loosely transport related – with the strongest bit about the US after the west was opened up by transport links – but a fascinating visualisation on how notable people have shifted around the world.
Maximilian Schich, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas, and his colleagues used Freebase—a crowdsourced database of facts—to record the birthplaces and locations of death of 120,000 people who were considered important enough to be included on the site. Then, he visualized the data on a map, tagging where notables were born in blue and where they died in red, turning the info into a short video called “Charting Culture” that details the findings from 600BC and 2012.