I hope this may be helpful for someone looking to model a particular area.
I recently was looking into purchasing a new home and wanted to see where it was located on the map. I used Mapquest.com to find the area. I noticed that Mapquest now offers an street / aerial view in the top right hand corner of the map. I used the street map to find the location then switched to aerial view to see the actual area. It zooms in close enough to count cars in a train.
I used it yesterday to check out two area power plants that are coal operated. It showed a lot of detail so now I know where they locate various parts of the plants and how the trains come in and exit.
It thought this might be useful to model the prototype.
An excellent new competitor in this area is Microsoft’s Live mapping application. You can use it at http://local.live.com/. It has really great aerial photos and many are very recent. I took a trip this summer to visit my sister and the aerial photo of her house has my car parked in the driveway! You can also view any area from any compass direction using the aerial photo setting. This is especially helpful when trees or other large buildings block your view of a detail.
Here is an aerial view of a bridge I plan to model:
This is a great find. I was able to trace what is now the Union Pacific Sunset Route all the way across Arizona and into California and New Mexico. I could even tell where previous alignments had been because there are still traces of the old roadbed.
The aerial photo of my house shows our 05 camper we bought in May of 05 parked out front of the house. So it is at most 19 months old.
I checked a couple of areas and found that the street map version differed from the aerial version. Where there were tracks shown in an area that use to be the Potomac Yard in Alexandria, Virginia and now is a shopping center. The aerial view shows the shopping center.
I don’t know how old some photo’s are but what I’ve seen so far the photo’s are more current than the street map.