The White River and Northern Model Railroad: Clinic

	The N Scale

	Model Railroad

Photomapping

What does your whole layout really look like in plan form? Even with the most careful planning and drafting, the final product rarely ends up just the way we'd originally anticipated. One evening I was shooting the WR&N IV with my camcorder, and wondered what it would look like from a pretend airplane. The results inspired the concept of photomapping.

I photographed the entire layout with the camera set squarely against the ceiling, then painstakingly stitched the dozens of images together to form a "satellite" photo rendering of the whole layout. Below is the WR&N IV track plan derived from the original computer drawings. Compare it to the photomap below it.

Some of the differences are subtle; others are striking. One of the most obvious changes was an extension off of the lower right corner which was not originally planned. Also note the change in the shape of the top left end of the layout. (Admittedly, many details are very hard to discern at this size, but full-sized maps would take a substantial amount of time to download.)

One of the challenges of this process is accounting for parallax. The effect manifests itself around taller structures, which will lean at wildly different angles between different shots. One must bear in mind that building foundations are the common reference point between adjacent images. To help size and orient the images, they were superimposed directly over the layout plan in the software. A sample image is shown at full size below.

Spano Recycling Center on the White River and Northern IV

Image specs: The image above is not a photograph but instead a frame grab from a Hi-8 camcorder tape. All of the photomapping was done using frame grabs, as I did not have a digital still camera at the time. CorelDraw was used for the layout plan; Corel Photo-Paint was used to stitch the images together.

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