I’m new to the hobby and thinking about a prototype layout of the railroad through my town as a starting point. In order to get a “birdseye” view of the tracks and how they are laid out in real life, where would you guys suggest I look? I can obviously take pictures as best I can of the tracks as they make their way through town, but I didn’t know if there was a website where you can find rail-maps, etc.? Sorry so general, just a newbie!
Mike Brubaker
Google Earth and Microsoft Live give you great aerial views of almost anything. You can take a virtual tour of almost any town.
[#ditto] you can also use map quest. But be warned, most of these maps are some what out dated by a couple years. So you would have to know if any tracks or crossings got changed or abonded. But that wouldn’t be to hard.
Here’s a few maps from before the “Google Age”.
Okay,
Finally a question I can help someone with. This is something that puzzled my for a long time until I finally stumbled onto it by total accident…
I was always on the lookout for a track map of Springfield, Ohio where I live and never could find one, I asked at the Heritage center, The Pennsylvania House, The George Rodgers Clark Museum… and no one knew where I could get a railroad map, I even tried professional resources, I am an appraiser and I do mass real estate contracts and deal with auditors and engineers on a daily basis…
One day I went to the Heritage center (Our County Historical Society is there)and spoke with the historian about a street I was looking for that was no longer on the modern map (genealogy project for the wife). The historian showed me a city directory for 1912 and I found where the street name had been changed from the old name to the new one and I knew where the new street name was… but looked at the city survey atlas from 1894 and low and behold there were railroad lines for every section of the city, in complete detail, yards laid out, roundhouses, turntables, interchanges, sidings, spurs (and the name of the business to which they belonged.)
I have decided to adopt as a pet project, creating a full sized railroad map of the city circa 1894, as a reference just for this purpose… BHut its will be an even bigger undertaking than building a model railroad.
Hope this helps