Google Earth as a modelling tool

[railsquid]

I've been working with a bunch of grabs, from 'out in the countryside' street view, to make a back scene for my layout. Hard to locate the the Scotland/Wales border on Google Earth though...... 

I see Google Earth offers views of Mars and the Moon as well, have you tried looking there?

[kmitchell]

I agree with the general sediments of the GE conversation. I am using it to develop the southern english railway coastline around Dawlish UK.

Ken

[jivebunny]

Google Earth certainly has its uses.

In my case, the historical imagery didn't show Chester before the 1999 MPD remodelling*, which was what I needed, so I opted for the second-best solution and purchased a 1982-1990 map of Chester from old-maps.co.uk - a very good service by the way, highly recommended. I saved a screenshot of the area of the map that I needed, and used this screenshot to create an "Image Overlay" in GE (from the "Add" menu) which I then placed on top of the nearest suitable imagery (2003).

I reduced the opacity so that I could see the imagery underneath it to assist with lining them both up, and after a bit of rotating, scaling and generally just poking the map about to fit the satellite images, I saved it and exported the combined image as a JPEG, which I then imported to AnyRail as an object. I measured the distance between two landmark points in Google Earth, scaled this distance down to 1:148 and placed a ruler in Anyrail using the result. This enabled me to scale the imported image down to the correct size by ensuring the two points were the correct distance apart, as indicated by the ruler. I'm probably a few feet off over a distance of about half a mile, but that's certainly close enough for me. No doubt a more accurate result can be obtained with enough time and thought. Once that was done it was just a case of laying my track down over the combined satellite imagery and map, referring to other sources as necessary.

Note: To export it from GE I downloaded the trial version of Google Earth Pro, as that allows you to export in higher resolutions than you can using Google Earth's File > Save > Save Image tool. The trial will only work for a limited time (30 days IIRC) before politely asking if you'd like to purchase a licence for a couple of hundred quid, but it's more than enough to get your imagery sorted and export it. It will export the image with watermarks, but that was a compromise I was willing to make for a higher-quality image.

Anyway, a picture speaks a thousand words, so here's the end result. The track will loop around to the south at all three exit points, making a giant roundy-roundy.

JB



*Well it did, but that imagery was from 1945 so you can imagine the quality!

[daveg]

A clever solution JB!

Thanks for posting.

Dave G