How Can I Calculate Total Miles of Track?

[railfan1928]

I use primarily Google Earth when railfanning on rail maps lately. It has a ruler tool to help me calculate total miles of track, but it is very cumbersome, especially for those times when I want to measure the amount of rail in a large yard, for example. I wish I could just use the polygonal measurement tool to draw an area that I want analyzed, then it would calculate the total miles of track within that area using the rail layer under transportation in Google Earth. Is there any way to do this? Or some other way? What are my options?

Thanks for the help.

[AmtrakLocomotiveEngineer]

You could always do it the old fashioned way, walk it. Lol

[jamoldover]

Since track in a yard isn't necessarily spaced equally, even if it were possible to do the measurement by the method you propose, it wouldn't necessarily be correct. If you want a correct measurement, in Google Earth, you would need to draw a path following the centerline of each piece of track, then look at the Measurement tab (shown in the Path Properties window), and add up all of the measurements.

[RussNelson]

Download a copy of JOSM from josm.openstreetmap.de. If the area you want to measure is well-mapped, you can just select the tracks you're interested in, and JOSM will tell you the total distance. For example, Selkirk Yard in NY has 200km of tracks.

If the area you want to measure is not well-mapped, well, then, your task is clear: map it. Search for "josm tutorial" if you need help, or ask me.