Maschen yard in Germany

[dan armstrong]

Here is a png file of the rail yard in Machen, Germany. It was made with 54 images downloaded from google earth. It is 7235x5854 pixels. I created a macro, using Macro Express, to automatically move around the google earth program and save the images.

[Randy]

Re: Maschen yard in Germany

Wow, what an image! Very nice, using a macro to capture it.

I increased its contrast and did things to make the colors more natural and appealing. This is the large PNG file, MaschenYard.png. Then I reduced it to 8-bits per pixel, resulting in the small PNG file MaschenYard-8bit.png. This is lots smaller and looks essentially the same. No resolution was lost, only the color spectrum was compressed.

This was still too large to load into 3PI, so I rotated the image 45 degrees CCW and reduced the image size substantially. The file MaschenYard45.bmp can be loaded into 3PI for tracing. A 3pi file that includes this image is also posted... in N scale, it would take 56.25 x 12.5 meters (184.5 x 41 feet) to model this 9km x 2km hump yard.


Note: in all images, you'll find a pair of concentric green circles centered on a bridge. This is the location from which the sequence shots were taken:

Maschen Sorting Sequence

Photos from 9 Feb, 1999

[dan armstrong]

Re: Maschen yard in Germany

Here is what I did to get the large Bailey yard image into 3pi. Paintshop Pro has an image slicer in it(maybe photoshop has one). I took the large image and sliced it into 12 vertical strips of the same dimensions. I imported the first vertical strip and sized it to match the image. I tried to import all of the others, but had trouble trying to get an image to auto-align to another image. Adjusting the points in the ODW was also troublesome. I then took the first image and used the array tool to make multiple copies that were side by side. Then I just reassigned the images in each frame. I put each image in its own layer, so they can be turned on/off as desired.