GIS System and Roadrailers (and a bit of aerial reconnaissance too)

Mr. Trainiac Jul 14, 2021

  1. Mr. Trainiac

    Mr. Trainiac TrainBoard Member

    1,540
    2,131
    46
    This is a bit random, but I found something cool I thought I'd show.

    I model BNSF in 2001, and a signature train from this time was their Ice Cold Express roadrailer service. The train normally ran from San Bernardino (later Bell), California to Naperville, Illlinois, a suburb of Chicago. For a time, there was also continuing service across the CSX, and CN had their own roadrailers on the train too.

    Naperville is in DuPage county, and the county website has an online GIS system to view land parcels. This is a really cool tool, but what makes it special is the ability to change the photo overlay. Most GIS systems that I have seen have at least a 'Google Earth' type view, but the Dupage County system has archival aerial photos going back to 1957, not just the present day.

    If other counties have their own photos like these in their archives, it would be awesome to get them online. As modelers, we can use it to see old track arrangements, industries, and surrounding structures. Here is a shot from the 1998 version:
    Naperville Roadrailer Ramp.JPG

    I believe this to be the Naperville roadrailer ramp, where the Ice Cold Express terminated. On the tracks to the left, you can see two cuts of cars. The one on the left is a roadrailer set, but I'm not sure what the cars on the right are. They are too short to be 89' autoracks for that auto staging lot on the extreme left (you can see a single autorack at the end of the track to the left of the roadrailer set.) The factory on the right is a Nabisco plant, which is still rail-served today.

    Here is a closeup of the unknown cars:
    roadrailer close up.JPG

    You can just make out the Roadrailer's Couplermate in the shadow at the end. At first, I thought the other cars were Gunderson AutoMaxes, but they don't look like 2-unit sets. Each unit measures about 56 or 58 feet long, which isn't right for that car type either. Older views from the 1986 map show regular autoracks on these tracks, so I'm assuming this is some type of autorack too. The 3-unit car is also a mystery. Could this be the Trinity 3-unit prototype autorack? http://www.qstation.org/Intermodal_ATSF/Autoracks/ATSF_Autoracks_17.jpg The silver ends above the doors match up.

    I just find it fun to figure out what things like this are.

    Anyways,
    Here is what it looks like today:
    nabisco plant.JPG

    The two tracks that the roadrailer and autoracks sit on in the first photo are torn up, and the auto staging lot is now taken over by a road salt storage dome and a Naperville Public Works warehouse. The Nabisco plant is still there, and the wye up top connects to the BNSF Chicago Subdivision (The Racetrack). Eola yard is a bit to the west, and Chicago is to the east.

    I just think these photos are so cool, and being able to look back to the 1950's is really wild. I wish more counties had older images like this. It would make historical research and mapping a lot easier.
     
    BNSF FAN, gmorider and BoxcabE50 like this.
  2. rch

    rch TrainBoard Member

    349
    825
    32
    I think you found it!

    Those older images are a great resource. I wish we had quality images like that for the 80s.

    I have tried to bring models with me on the road but they don't do well getting tossed around on the train and crew van. Little things like building Sergent couplers in the hotel seem to be fine, but that gets old to me and I only need so many couplers.

    What I've been doing instead over the years in the hotel is using Google Earth to map out what would have been the active railroads in my modeling era and the industries along the line. A lot changed in Dallas-Fort Worth following the UP-Katy merger and even more once the DART light rail system began construction. By the time quality aerial photos were widely available online most of the old rails were gone, relocated or replaced by light rail. So, armed with timetables from the era and Google Earth I'm mapping what I can.

    When I first started doing this Tower 55 in Fort Worth was undergoing a reconstruction/reconfiguration project, so I wanted to map what was there before it disappeared. That turned into mapping all the (then current) railroads in the area which is now morphing into a snapshot of the area in the 80s.

    Google Earth has a historical imagery option that allows you to select aerial photos from the past, but the quality drops way off before 2005 for my area of interest. I've had some success using topographic quadrangle maps and screen grabs from historicaerials.com to map some of the stuff that's long gone.

    One thing I've found fascinating is mapping out the various industries along the way. Some have grown, some have declined and some are gone forever. Dallas-Fort Worth manufactures a lot of things but doesn't produce many raw materials, so the industries in my area in most cases bring loads in and send empties out. Figuring out where those raw materials come from and how they get to the industries can be a challenge, but you can pick up a ton of information in the subdivision special instructions of a railroad timetable from the era. Sometimes there's a reference to a business that's had a name change and searching that name and city will bring up all kinds of results you might not have found otherwise.

    Here's an example of an old quarry that was at its end of life in my era. I couldn't find any good aerial photos of it, but I was able to sketch out the track layout from topo maps then dial it in using clues on older aerial photos. At this point there is scant evidence anything resembling a quarry existed in this warehouse district. The blue line is an old Santa Fe lead and connector to UP's Browder Yard from the old Santa Fe Dallas Subdivision. The bold yellow lines are the main tracks of UP's Dallas Subdivision and the deeper yellow lines in the middle of the image are a pair of tracks that were located on either side of the rock crusher and loader.

    [​IMG]
     
    gmorider and Mr. Trainiac like this.
  3. Mr. Trainiac

    Mr. Trainiac TrainBoard Member

    1,540
    2,131
    46
    While looking around online for more information about the auto ramp, I found an old article about a BNSF program called CarsOnTrack, where you could pay BNSF to ship your personal car on a train. They even had a website where you could pay with your credit card (carsontrack.com - now defunct). This seems pretty complicated from a logistics standpoint, but BNSF had some pretty crazy ideas in the early 2000's. I'm not sure if this program ever got off the ground, but the Naperville auto ramp seems to have been decommissioned when the BNSF Logistics Park outside Joilet, IL was opened in 2002.

    I also checked out Google Earth Pro for myself, and it seems like the aerial views from that era are the same ones used on the 1998 map on the DuPage GIS system. The train cars on Google Earth are exactly the same. For some reason, I thought the maps were commissioned by DuPage county, but it seems like both Google and the county are using the same maps, maybe from USGS or Landsat. I guess that's a good thing, because now I can see maps that aren't on the GIS systems of other counties.
     
  4. rch

    rch TrainBoard Member

    349
    825
    32
    Google will use aerial photos from a wide variety of sources, so it's possible they licensed the DuPage County images.

    When I worked for a civil engineering firm in southwest Colorado we did the ground work for some highly detailed aerial images commissioned by the local government and ended up with access to those images via a CD-ROM library. That was a different time, though - downloading video from the internet was in its infancy so the thought of downloading 70 woo woo woo images was unheard of. I'm curious if those images ever got licensed to Google.
     

Share This Page