Follow Favorite Route on Aerial Photo Website

Log on to
terraserver.microsoft.com
and you can get an overhead view of about any rail line in the "48 states".
No membership stuff required.

Prety impressive. I just spent some time on it. Kinda of scary tho...makes you wonder how often you are being watched

I agree, google earth is MUCH better, plus you can turn on a railroad layer and will show the approximate location of most railroad lines (including abandoned c. 1970-1980 U.S.)

Could you give a link to the Google? My uncle and I traced much of the Central New England ( Hartford, CT to Campbell-Hall, NY ) about 10 years ago.
-Spike

http://earth.google.com/

They recommend that you have a broadband internet connection - the amount of map data transfered to your computer is pretty high. Other hardware requirements are listed on the site, but if you're not savvy in that area you can always just try to see if it works.

It's a relatively simple program to use, and some of the features make it well worth learning.

-Nick

Once you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you can get specifically the Central New England Railway here:

http://www.googleearthhacks.com/dlfile1 ... ailway.htm

Ahhhh, but with NASA's World Wind, you can load up my shapefile of New York State Railroad Routes, and trace every railroad ever graded in New York State.
World Wind: http://worldwindcentral.com/
My shapefile: http://russnelson.com/nyrr/

That same data is also availlable plotted (one line at a time) on Google Maps:
http://rutlandtrail.org/list.cgi

Yes, I know, it's just for New York State. In principle, though, other people could do the same thing for other states. It's a metric buttload of work, but it's only taken me two years of very part-time work and research. My discovery rate for new lines is down to one every other month.