MeowRailroad
CKRail
On the Model Railroad Hobbyist forums someone posted a map of US railroads... down to individual spurs. This is clearly an amazing resource and can be found here: http://www.openrailwaymap.org/
Amazing map of railroads
- Thread starter MeowRailroad
- Start date
Thank you very much for that link. This is such a great resource for Trainz route builders. It even shows obsolete rail lines in places you would not know existed, like Bermuda or Turnchapel near Plymouth UK.
Cheers,
Roy3b3
SuperSpeedMaglev
Wonderfully Old Fashioned
This is great! Especially in my area telling me the name of the line.. Saves having to follow the line manually.. 
Yes it is very good though in fact has been around for a while. When I last tried it the scrolling wasn't working that well but tested just now and seems to be working. Useful in identifying where old railways ran as many of these aren't shown on Open Street Map or in some cases have been removed.
WELL great. I was going to be productive for the next few days but now I have this! Arg!
But yes this is amazing and with sites like this: https://bridgehunter.com/ you can also figure out what the bridges look like on the abandoned (or not so) lines!
But yes this is amazing and with sites like this: https://bridgehunter.com/ you can also figure out what the bridges look like on the abandoned (or not so) lines!
What is very interesting is to look at the areas that have rail and those that don't
After Europe, most of North America, India and Japan, there are only scattered areas with any visible rail network showing.
Too bad this couldn't be used as is to create a Trainz map.
After Europe, most of North America, India and Japan, there are only scattered areas with any visible rail network showing.
Too bad this couldn't be used as is to create a Trainz map.
Open Railway Map shares resources with OSM. They explicitly mention the OSM standard vector editor JOSM. Via JOSM and the gpx file format, vector data transfer to TransDEM should be possible.
Depends on zoom level. Zoom in and you will find much more. Zoom dependent aspects may be things like standard gauge vs. narrow gauge. "Standard gauge" varies by country. In the and it's all down to attributes, ask the OSM folks. Anyway, I spotted my own OSM contributions which I had made occasionally in the past, in some rather remote places on this planet, like Burma, Eritrea or Madagascar.
amigacooke
Well-known member
It's not infallible. The Caterham line (UK) off the Brighton line alternates between single and double track on this map, whereas it is double all the way in reality.
I noticed some things like that as well and also the names of the routes as well. Instead of saying Pan Am Railways Freight Main, the map will say Freight Main. Okay for which railroad? I know of course but not other people.
All and all it gets pretty depressing when you zoom in on places like New Maine, New Hampshire, York state, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Many of these lines were active when I was young and now closed and mostly when Conrail and Guilford took over the operations.
I would say that with redundant lines this makes sense, but not some of the through lines. Guilford was famous for this because they were not part of the Freight Main. They went as far as to deliberately discourage business and use then use that as an excuse to force the abandonment of the lines.