The availability of digital satellite photos through services like Google Maps and Bing have yielded a wealth of information for the modern age modeler. One of the challenges though is how to leverage satellite photos inside powerful layout design tools like 3rdPlanIt. I’ve been working through this over the past few days and feel I’ve arrived at a good efficient process.
Let’s see how this works in practice. I’ve selected the Ingredion siding (formerly CASCO) in Port Colborne, Ontario on the Trillium Railway as an example. The Google Map is available here.
The first step is to get a screen capture from Google Maps of the area you want to model. It almost always pays to make the screen capture as big as possible. I use the Snipping Tool that comes with Windows with the Window Snip option to get the whole browser window. Go to Google Maps in satellite mode and zoom into the area you want to capture. I try to get down to a consistent zoom level which makes the next steps a little easier. The most important thing to remember is to get the little scale that Google puts on every map into the screen capture (using the Window Snip option should ensure this happens). On the screen capture below, the scale shows 20 meters since I did the screen capture in Europe:
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Using the Save option in the Windows Snipping Tool, save the screen capture as a jpg and note the size of the jpg; on my system, the size of my monitor gives 1920 x 1168 pixel screen captures.
Next, open 3rdPlanIt and start with a fresh file working in feet and inches. The 20’x20′ default room is a good one to start with. It is also good practice to add a new layer to hold the aerial photograph:
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The next step is to convert the dimensions in the 3rdPlanIt file to model scale units. There is a checkbox on the File/Settings/Units that you must click. This converts the dimensions in the 3rdPlanIt file to real-world units. For an HO scale drawing, every dimension gets multiplied by 87.
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Now with the Aerial Photo layer active, select the “Place Image” tool. Starting at the (0,0) corner (the lower left), click and drag your cursor until the size of the photo is about 19200″ by 11680″. This is the proportion of the jpg file multiplied by 10 and should just about fill the 20′ dimension. It is critical to keep the proportion of the jpg when drawing the object; once the image is placed in the right proportion, we can drag the upper right corner to bring the image to the final dimensions. Working in HO scale here and with the level of zoom I typically work, I find that I need to make the jpg image about 22 feet wide:
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Once I’m at this point, I switch the units to meters to align with the Google Map scale and switch the layer to the Main Layer. Now, zoom into the Google scale section and the bottom right. Select the Draw Track and draw a piece of track from one end of the scale to the either. Now check the length of this track segment in the track detail box in the top right. If the two are close (say 21 meters compared to Google Maps’ 20 meter scale), then you are done. If they are significantly different, select the placed image again and grabbing the same upper right corner, increase or decrease the size of the image accordingly and redraw the check track segment again:
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Now you can return to the Main Layer and start drawing track right over the Google map. I usually start by putting turnouts down first. Next to be drawn are the end of the various spurs. I then use the SoftTrack connect tool to tie them together. If the Google Map satellite photo has railcars on the spurs, I’ll often add a couple of them from the Rolling Stock library to confirm I’ve got the scale right:
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From here, you can just group the trackage in the Main Layer together, copy it and paste it into your layout design file as a Layout Design Element.
What’s nice about this approach is that it gives you a good feel of the track arrangements on the prototype and how much space would be required to model things faithfully. For the Ingredion spur, the prototype would take about 12 feet to model faithfully, a luxury many of us would not have. However, from here, we can build up our strategies to selectively compress scenes like this one for modeling.