Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Waymarking the Pere Marquette
I ran across some posts on Waymarking from earlier this week--it looks like the poster, steveherrick, is making his way north along Amtrak's Pere Marquette. In his first post he's got some great pictures of the old Pere Marquette station in St. Joseph, now used by Amtrak. For his second post he's up in Holland with photographs of an old PM caboose built by the St. Louis Car Company. I've never used Waymarking before but it looks pretty cool; some quick searching turned up lots of pictures of trains stations, old cars etc.
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7 comments:
It's funny...I looked at this waymarking site you speak of, and for fun I plugged in my ZIP code, and the same steveherrick came up.
Anyway, that looks to be a cool site...we speak of these kinds of things from time to time in my cartography class, about publicly built geodatabases, and how nowadays there's big money in mining these.
I didn't look at the license Waymarking uses for its content, but there's obvious utility in this kind of thing. If you're a business, just get someone to take photographs and throw them up there.
Oh, and congrats on posting the first-ever comment ;)
The honor is all mine.
And let me know if you'd like me to direct my slowly expanding mapmaking talents/interests toward anything you'd like as regards the rails of our fine state. I already know at least one source for vector data on railways in Michigan. An amateur needs practice, and while I'm content to make up my own random ephemeral projects, generating something another may find useful is a bit more worthwhile.
As it so happens, an editor requested a map for the Wikipedia article on the Grand Rapids, Belding and Saginaw Railroad. I can provide the necessary data on endpoints and what not.
Righto. I'll have a look at the data tonight, and do some fiddling probably tomorrow. I've got my own software, but it's free and rather low quality. But, $30,000+ of software is at my command when I am at the university, so I will experiment with trying this using state of the art stuff.
Usually the state does a decent job of making clear what lines in their files correspond to what railroads, but just in case, maybe you'd better send the data along.
Are there any guidelines/requests as to style?
I just looked at the article and realized, which I hadn't before, that said railroad is defunct. So, the question would be: have the locations of the rails changed? If not, then I can pull up vectors on the current rail system and pick out the relevant pieces that formed the GRBS. If not, that may be more of a challenge, in terms of finding the data as to where the thing way.
Most of the rails are still there, although the current owner (Mid-Michigan Railroad), has petitioned the STB for permission to abandon it. The tracks might also be listed under CSX or Railtex, depending on how old your data is.
The Freeport-Elmdale section has been gone for a long time, so you'll have to look for the old grade.
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