Railroad Forums 

  • Google Earth Timelapse

  • General discussion about railroad operations, related facilities, maps, and other resources.
General discussion about railroad operations, related facilities, maps, and other resources.

Moderator: Robert Paniagua

 #1410669  by YamaOfParadise
 
Google updated new project of theirs, Google Earth Timelapse, which lets you to see a timelapse from 1984 to 2016 of the best available imagery in any particular year anywhere in the world: which allows you to see things develop and change over time. Besides from what Google themselves showed as examples (depressing shots of glaciers melting into nothingness and the development of China), it strikes me that this is incredibly useful for seeing more recent railroad history in action. Both the abandonment of lines with the subsequent redevelopment over top (or just reclamation of nature), as well as the construction of new facilities and even new lines being built. The quality is about as good as you can expect, and varies from area to area based on what the best-possible imagery was available. It's not super high-resolution, but it's still very good at displaying larger-scale trends.

I've yet to really look too hard at finding examples for it, as I'm busy with the end of my fall semester at the moment... but I thought I'd share the knowledge of this tool.

So, if you find any really striking examples, link 'em here with a bit of background of what's happening!
 #1410697  by NorthWest
 
Interesting- wonder which images they are using. I am working on Google Earthing most of the North American rail network, past and present but in a fictional alternate universe, and almost all the imagery dating to before 2000 is black-and-white. I guess they must be using the landsat images, which are still in place in areas where there aren't photographs, and these images are very grainy. You can usually still find the ROWs, though, like the Dease Lake line that is mostly all still landsat images.