Hey everyone, I was thinking today, since alot of us like searching for and looking at railroad related places in Google Earth, how hard would it be to make a google earth layer of popular and/or historic railroading places? On my program I've placemarked quite a few different places, like the big 10 curves and moffat tunnel in CO, and the AZ divide and Supai summit on the old Santa Fe here in AZ. I bet even Hemi could placemark every tunnel on the front range! :tb-wink: I think it would be cool to have an layer of railroadings popular places, and have the layer available for download to anyone that's a member of the forums who wants it. I know there could and would be alot of content, and it would be an ongoing process, but I think it would be great to have that info available if someone wanted/needed to look at a certain railroad place, past or present. What do ya all think? Good or Bad? Yes or No? -Mike
Scott, I don't have alot placemarked, since I know where most of the places are I look at often. Here is what I do have: Big 10 curves East Portal Moffat Tunnel West Portal Moffat Tunnel Bond Dotsero Cutoff Soldier Summit Gilluly Loops Canyon Diablo Arizona Divide Williams Junction Supai Summit Two Medicine River Bridge Marias Pass Sheep Creek Trestle Rochelle Diamonds Darren, here's what I'm thinkin'... I used an RR Xing picture as the placemark icon, and have saved all these places in another folder in GE. In the options part of the placemark, you can add info about the area, and I think a picture also, so when you click on the placemark icon, a bubble comes up with all the info. pretty cool. I went to this link http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mapper.html and tried to do what they showed in the video, but couldn't get it to work. This way would be alot better than what I'm doing, but for now, I guess just making a placemark and adding it to a folder would work. I figure we could split up folders for, say, all AZ or all CO, or make a folder for a specific railroad, like SP or BNSF. That way you could uncheck the folder and all the placemarks in that folder will be removed from the GE screen. Would make it easier if you just wanted to look at some of the ghost railroads in CO instead of everything in CO, past and present. One thing I can see that might kinda suck is that there will be alot of different folders to keep track of and save placemarks in. For example, if you include Bond, Colorado as a placemark, you could add it to the Colorado folder, the D&SL folder, the D&RGW folder, and the UP folder. Same would go for Marias Pass. Montana folder, Great Northern folder, Burlington Northern folder and BNSF folder. As to the hosting of the folder on TB, thats up to you Admin guys. What I can see that would be needed is this: A way to download the folder, add new placemarks when you want, and upload it back to TB or email it to an Admin with the updated placemarks so it can then be available for Forum users to download again. I don't know how or if this is possible. Could also post a thread that it's been updated and list what was updated/added. Maybe a sticky? I'm just throwing out ideas for yous guys Also, if you wanna see those places I have, here is the .KMZ file for Google Earth. For the time being, I'll host it on my website so you can see what I have in mind. http://www.owensvalleysub.com/GoogleEarthRR If you guys wanted to do this, it would be quite a large undertaking, but with all of us adding our favorite places (past and present), I think it would start to fill out pretty quick. =) -Mike
