Yes it's one of those hidden treasures on the internet John. It's a website that I use fairly often when I'm researching my 19th century projects.
That's great! It's funny how discoveries of the same information occur amongst us. I'm working on a project for a friend. We're involved in music projects together and I mentioned Trainz of course. Well, it turns out his grandfather was a brakeman for the Erie Railroad back in the early 1910s and his father also worked as a machinist for the Erie but at a different location I can't remember. Through our conversation, he mentioned building the line as an HO model railroad, but was instantly shocked by the cost of everything these days. One thing led to another, and I thought I could easily find the data and build the route. This is where TransDEM, and TRS2019 come in...
The line in particular, where his grandfather worked, is no longer in existence except for a tiny stub off the mainline much to the south. A big chunk of the line is now at the bottom of the Monksville Reservoir in New Jersey and after looking around on the National Map server, I found the DEMs for the area, but struggled to get the topographic maps due to some "fixing" done on the server. Yes, some idiots actually broke some of the map files turning them from needed Geo-Tiff format to regular Tiff files! After digging, I found some PDFs and downloaded those and assembled the route. The process of searching for historical topographic maps overall has become overly complex as things have been broken due to stupidity. My fear a lot of the data will disappear and never be accessible again!
At the moment, I'm laying the track down and interpolating where the ROW is today since the DEM flattened out everything at that point. In other locations, the ROW has become a road, so that's fairly easy to follow. Being a retiree himself, he's now researching photos and having a blast with this project. I have a feeling that eventually he'll end up with TRS2019 himself, or if my budget holds up, I'll get him a copy of Platinum when that goes on sale again.
The steam engines came in when my friend sent me some pics he found of his granddad standing at the cow catcher on the front of a loco. I don't have that particular loco, which I thought I did, but put in an Erie Russian Decapod instead in the same location as the photo and sent him a picture. The western shore of Greenwood Lake is obvious in the photo and the same in the screen capture. I'm sure he'll be surprised I'm sure by the screen shot because I know he can't imagine what can be done when the Trainz gods line up things the right way for us.