First I ever heard of Frog Rail but I have marked that in my favorites now.
Jerry
Jerry
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Friends,
I thought I might share how I lay out roads. First we will never get a road exactly right, there is just not enough variety of pieces to do it, but roads are eye-candy and only essential where they interact with the trains. First I use Google Earth to lay out the path for roads or tracks. What you will find is that from one aerial set to another there is linear variation of as much as 50 feet, so choose the one that you get the most crisp image with. I find that is probably, but not always, any date from about 2015 on.
Once you have the marker file, put it in the route and now go back to Google Earth. GE does not give us very accurate elevation data but in general we can tell where the peaks and valleys are, so using the pushpins locate these points and type in the elevation in meters. That is: feet/3.28 = meters. Now enter these locations manually in the marker file of your route and go to each one with the terrain shape visible. Put the mouse on the digitized path where the pushpin marker is located and read the "Y" value in meters. It usually is not the same as what you got from GE but it may be close. So edit the point value using the value just found and I always go back to GE and change it there too. Now you can measure the distance between points using the path measure tool. Now subtract the low meters from the high meters and multiply by 3.28. Now divide this value by the measured distance and you will have the % of grade. Sometimes the points are close, sometimes far apart but this (as far as I am concerned) gives a passable profile for a road.
Jerry (landnrailroader)Comment
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