First off, I wish upon everyone the best of the new year!

I'm sure that most, if not all, of you use online maps and satellite imagery to find and track abandoned railroad routes. And there are a number of good tools out there for doing so -- the tools of my choice are Google Maps and Acme Mapper. And I'm sure that some of you probably use the maps on the Abandoned Rails website for your own reference. When I first started mapping abandoned routes, there were (and still are) three different kinds of maps that one can use:

Google Maps/Earth (or any online mapping website)
Satellite imagery
USGS Topographical Maps

Each offers their own benefits, of course, but each also have their own drawbacks. My intent with the abandoned route maps I present on the website was to show accurate routings and artifacts of abandoned railroad routes. The routing of an abandoned line may be obvious on all three mediums above, but the artifacts of a line are most likely not as obvious, except for on the Topo maps. For example, Google Maps may just show a railroad line running through a small town; the corresponding satellite image would show the distinct signs of an abandoned railroad route along the same path. The Topo map, however, will show perhaps a parallel siding or two within the town, and also any railroad-related structures nearby, such as a water tower. I would be hard-pressed to discern either the sidings or the water tower in Maps or satellite imagery, but they are clearly marked on a Topo map. In other cases, Google Maps may not even show the line, when both the satellite imagery and the Topo map indicate that a railroad line once ran through town. In the opposite case, Google Maps may show a railroad line, but there is no evidence of the line in satellite imagery due to urban developments along the right-of-way, or satellite imagery may not be available for that area; the line continues to show in Topo maps, however. In extreme cases, an abandoned line may not show up in any of the three mediums, if it has been abandoned long enough. Here again, though, the Topo map proves the most useful, as a trained eye can trace abandoned routes by following the contour lines imposed on the Topo map where the drawn line itself is otherwise absent; indeed, I have resorted to this method on a number of maps on my website.

What I'm getting at here is that, among the three mapping mediums I use, I find the USGS Topo maps to be the most useful as far as accuracy and consistency are concerned. The USGS has certainly striven for detailed accuracy when they produce their maps, and I feel that these "official" maps are the best to use when tracing an abandoned railroad right-of-way. Thus, I use topographical maps for roughly 90% of the routes I draw for the website. Using these Topo maps, I am able to depict such artifacts as passing sidings, small 3-4 track yards, and other artifacts/landmarks that may be of interest to the abandoned railroad hunter. In addition, Topo maps indicate ownership alongside the line, which is helpful in historical research.

This is all well and good. But, as expected, some problems do arise from my almost exclusive use of Topo maps. First, in my experience in tracing routes, there are numerous discrepancies between Google Maps, satellite imagery, and Topo maps. For example, the Topo map may show an abandoned route running north-south through a small town, the satellite imagery may show the same line but offset by up to 100 feet to the west, and Google Maps may show bends and curves in the line where both satellite imagery and the Topo maps show a straight right-of-way. How are these differences resolved? Some may suggest that the abandoned route depicted in the satellite image is correct, since it most definitely shows where the route once traveled. To add to the confusion, the Topo map and satellite imagery may BOTH be correct: the Topo map shows the location of the line when the map was rendered, typically in the mid-1980s, whereas the satellite image may show the location of the line from much more recently (within the last couple of years). Who's to say that the line was not relocated during this time? Second, the Abandoned Rails website does not show Topo maps, but rather Google Maps, so when I trace a line using a Topo map, it may not necessarily coincide with the railroad line pre-drawn on the Google Map, and this will certainly lead to confusion on the part of some visitors.

A short aside: Frankly, I do not know how Google Maps gets the railroad lines that it draws on their maps. When tracing a route just recently, I found that the railroad route drawn by Google Maps had two 90-degree turns, each within 20 feet of each other. This is obviously an error, and quite comical to imagine, but I digress.

Despite these differences, I choose to use USGS Topographical Maps to trace routes for Abandoned Rails. While this leads to discrepancies in the way routes are presented on Abandoned Rails (my own tracing versus the Google Maps pre-drawn tracing), I feel that my rendering is the more correct routing. One final consideration: one thing to love technology is that if you don't like something now, it will be better soon. Better mapping technologies are constantly emerging, and it is hard not to suspect that perhaps the pre-drawn routing of railroads on Google Maps will soon become more accurate, even to the point of matching my own routing!