Route-building resources

graemeo

New member
So I'm trying to build the Donner Pass route from Sacramento to Truckee in California, using baseboards that I found here after following a link in a forum post I read a little while ago (that's a fantastic resource, by the way :D). What I'm wondering is, does anyone know of any resources for route data? Things like track elevation, milepost locations, signal locations, speed limits, etc. Google Earth is fantastic for getting the location of the track, of course, but some cold, hard data would be nice too. :)
 
Two ideas, 1. contact the company that owns the line and see if they can give you this information, or 2. find somebody on the Trainz forum who lives there and can take photographs of such. Otherwise I wouldn't know what to do aside from guessing and hoping your close:p .

WileeCoyote:D
 
For additional resources, try to locate Railroad Timetables, either original ones or reprints. Altamont Press used to produce "Railfan" editions/compilations. This way you will get mileposts, length of sidings, speed limits and some other data.

For best terrain results, work with USGS NED 1/3 arc sec DEMs and download as geotiff to retain a vertical resolution of better than 1 meter. Not sure whether these hi-res DEMs were available when fishlipsatwork created his terrain three years ago.

Utilise USGS 1:24k topo maps for the "big picture", add Google Earth images for details. TIGER, on the other hand, will have limited accuracy.

See here for an example of Truckee with 1/3 arc sec DEMs and USGS 1:24k topo maps:



Look at the "sewage treatment ponds" and how they could appear in Surveyor.



geophil
 
Thanks for the tips so far, guys. :) Yeah, I'd temporarily forgotten about looking at topo maps. There are some decent (albeit old) maps on topozone.com, and the California Spatial Information Library has some decent digital raster graphics (DRGs) as well: they're pretty much plain topo maps, only georeferenced to load in a GIS. I think I do have 1 m elevation data on my computer, but I'll get that out when I need to use it.

TIGER is only about 1:100k scale, yeah, so it's definitely not the most accurate for the scale that I'm working at (obviously). I've been trying to plot - as best I can - the coordinates of the track using Google Earth and the lat/long reader on the DLS (setting the world origin in Surveyor as accurately as I can), and that seems to work fairly well. Though as someone mentioned in another thread, there will be distortion when going from a geographic coordinate system (Google Earth) where the world is assumed to be spheroid, into Trainz, in which I presume the "world" is assumed to be a flat board. We'll see how that goes.

Being a GIS specialist for a living comes in handy in my hobby time too, it seems. ;)

I didn't know about the Railroad Timetable thingys, so that's something to look into. I'd thought about shooting off an e-mail to Union Pacific, too, but I haven't got around to that just yet.

Thanks for all your help so far, guys. :)

~Nathan
 
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For TransDEM users I always recommend MS TerraServer as it offers USGS DRGS also via their WMS interface. Those are older map editions, too. Projection is UTM or Plate Carrée (pseudo-projection).

California Spatial Information Library has transformed the DRGs to some sort of state-specific projection - which major GIS systems will surely be able to cope with. I have tried to georeference these map images with a simple affine transformation instead and achieved reasonable results. (Maps in TerraServer are misaligned for some areas of California)

As nobody seems to know the lat/long projection Surveyor is using internally I wouldn't rely on that. I use UTM/WGS84 (which is equivalent to NAD83 for our purposes). Google Earth now offers UTM coordinates as well, if you prefer to deal with the images manually.

Altamont Press Railfan Timetables are avaibale here: http://www.altamontpress.com/
(You would also find them in US hobby shops or in gift shops of US RR museums.)

geophil
 
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