Model railroad layout guide 2, Preparing for a Trackplan

In the first part of this guide we look at what we want in terms of size, time period and geography. We looked at some Google maps and saved some screenshots, or did we ?

In part two of this guide we will discuss how to take screenshots from the maps and crop them. This will allow us to string these images together into a loose track-plan. This is an important step as we want to be able to visualize the plan, and well, your future layout.

Before we get too far into this guide I'd like to let you know about a free, professional alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is a photo editing program that costs $100's with liscences ranging into the $1000's. Gimp effectively matches the features of Adobe's product and it is completely free. The alternative to Gimp and Adobe is Windows paint (pre-loaded on windows machines), which lacks many of the features we focus on below.

We are going to bring our screen captures into Gimp and then rotate and crop them into the sections of your potential track-plan. So first task is to collect these cuttings so we can impose them onto our bench work.

Source Images

In article one, linked to the right here, shows how we find and download our source map scenes. These map locations show life as it is today. The theory is we replace all the era specific f

The biggest flaw to this plan is to not label all your files with descriptive titles and then collect them all in a dedicated folder also with a suitable title. And remember the larger the picture size, file size, the better the printing opportunities.

So I hope this second guide is found useful by you. Thank you for reading my work.