Map database for railfans.

[iceman977th]

I was thinking about if there was a central place that railfans can help identify different railroads. Has anyone thought of this? Maybe consisting of routes/points of interest for railfans? Would anyone be interested?

[frank754]

Yes, and it's a great idea. I know that people can make overlays for Google Earth, and I found one recent example for railroads and historic coal sites in NE PA.
This one guy did an incredible job, for example (you need to have Google Earth installed, and download the kmz file from the first post on this site):

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.p ... er=1110979

It would be great to have a set of these for the entire USA by decade, showing the abandonments, etc.
Plus also, I believe people can later add photo links along all the routes so that users can click on those.
Imagine if there were photos for each specific decade map.
I'm not sure if it's Google Maps or Google Earth or both, but I have seen where if you choose a certain option, there will be little picture links for the exact spots along the route.

[frank754]

OK, try this for example. On google maps, load my Pt Morris Map.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie ... oramio.all

You may want to zoom it down a bit.
Then go to "more" and uncheck and recheck "photos". This should bring in the photos on panoramia.com which users have place along the route. You can then travel west and see them. I did this one time from there all the way to Scranton.

[RussNelson]

I've been adding my database of New York State railbeds to OpenStreetMap. Once I get all the railbeds in there (I've got everything but the trolley/interurban lines), I'm going to go through and correct all the names. A bunch of them are Conrail, or even Penn Central, because they were imported from the TIGER dataset. And then once I get THAT done, I'm going to go through and add the build / abandon dates to all of them. It's probably going to take me another ten years to finish.

[iceman977th]

Yes, and it's a great idea. I know that people can make overlays for Google Earth, and I found one recent example for railroads and historic coal sites in NE PA.
This one guy did an incredible job, for example (you need to have Google Earth installed, and download the kmz file from the first post on this site):

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/ubbthreads.p ... er=1110979

It would be great to have a set of these for the entire USA by decade, showing the abandonments, etc.
Plus also, I believe people can later add photo links along all the routes so that users can click on those.
Imagine if there were photos for each specific decade map.
I'm not sure if it's Google Maps or Google Earth or both, but I have seen where if you choose a certain option, there will be little picture links for the exact spots along the route.

Something like that would be perfect, except just keep it on a web-based site like Google Maps or something. I did a little bit of waypoint routing of part of the Kanawha sub that I know, but I wish I could make it public and have people add parts, and I approve for them to be collaborated...