Analytics is my day job, so I've been doing some geospatial analysis at work lately. All that working with lats/longs got me curious to see if I could learn more about the elevation of the Back Road. I know I am just a regular non-railroader, but building a sim version of said line based on real-world elevation taught me that the line is certainly not "flat", even if rail grades are significantly less than their road counterparts generally are (largely due to ballast and other adjustments). I knew about the climbs through Deering (mainly after being held up by a stalled POWA at 195), up into Danville, and from Maranacook through Readfield, but wanted to see if I could get an idea for the line in its entirety.
Having manually plotted 1600 points of elevation on the line between Rigby and Waterville, I generated the GPX file and exported to Python to calculate a "rolling 10-point average" elevation for the entirety of the line, which you can see here (click to see full size). The highest point is around MP 154 (slightly north of College Rd. in Greene).
I plan on reworking this quite a bit and annotating more mileposts and points of interest. Stay tuned! And yes, I know that I used "CSX Waterville Subdivision" in the title and then the PAR mileposts in the subtitle.
Having manually plotted 1600 points of elevation on the line between Rigby and Waterville, I generated the GPX file and exported to Python to calculate a "rolling 10-point average" elevation for the entirety of the line, which you can see here (click to see full size). The highest point is around MP 154 (slightly north of College Rd. in Greene).
I plan on reworking this quite a bit and annotating more mileposts and points of interest. Stay tuned! And yes, I know that I used "CSX Waterville Subdivision" in the title and then the PAR mileposts in the subtitle.