Is there a North America All-Time All-Roads map in a software format?
A North American Railroads map in digital form that show railroad right-of-ways for every year since railroads were first built would help in locating both new and abandoned lines.
It would be helpful to have a time-lapse feature that shows when the rail lines were at their highest density for a state or city. It would show us what industries were important and where they used to be located.
Is there such a Digital Railroad map available?
Who on the TRAINS staff could make a digital all-time rail map?
The SPV maps are a pretty close approximation in hard copy form, but I’d also be interested in an all-time North American map. I suspect it would be a substantial undertaking, probably several man years to do it right. One saving grace is that what you’re proposing is a data set for a GIS application, so whoever is doing the map won’t have to re-invent the wheel in regards to writing the GIS software.
What would be really neat is to have proposed lines as well, but that would be another order of magnitude larger job than doing just the lines that were built.
There is a digital North American railroad map program available. In general, it goes back as far as WWII. Following is a link to their web site: http://www.softrail.com/railroadmap.html .
I’ve been using this program for about five years now, and it really comes in handy. This latest upgrade (3.0) was just introduced a month ago and is their best yet.