Google StreetView etc. might even have images along the gravel road to your grandma’s house. Four times already over the years.
But there’s one gaping lack in all their tons of images: railroad right of ways.
You know, what you see when you are looking out the windows of the observation car on Amtrak’s California Zephyr, etc.
I would say it is the largest gap in … well it’s just like if the president was missing a front tooth.
And we all know there is no way to get a word in edgewise to Google.
So this is where Mapillary can fill the gap.
Yes, remapping some road is important, however attention should also be turned to filling in those missing railroad views. USA and rest of world. Thank you.
Best would be to sign some deal with the Department of Transportation, to mount some professional equipment, on their so-called DOTX measurement cars, which are often attached to Amtrak trains right behind the engine. Or perhaps even better would be an external rear mounted or even front mounted camera. Yes, right on the very back of the train, or on the very front of the train, without any glass in the way. Like Capturing side view whilst on a train - #9 by dave683 YouTube video.
This is a pretty good idea, however there’s a few more problems.
For starters, Amtrak coverage kinda sucks. A LOT. There’s no service in the entirety of some states such as South Dakota or Wyoming and barely any in many more such as Idaho or Tennessee. This leaves us with freight railroads which have many of their own problems. It would be much easier to attach a camera device to the back of a mainline intermodal train, but eventually the train cars have to be moved around in a yard to get to their final destination. It would be an even worse issue on local trains which have to do a lot of switching around on the spurs they serve.
Plus the railroads would most likely be disinterested if it doesn’t give them money.
As well as these issues, you also have the problem of the time of day. Cameras at night are not very good at capturing good images. Freight trains also usually run without any schedule. And Amtrak tends to be many hours late and they also run at night.
In conclusion, this is a cool idea and I like the idea of being able to see images coverage from the tracks. However it’s not going to be very easy to accomplish this, hence why nobody has done it in a large scale before.
While it is a good idea to have railway tracks captured on Mapillary, it is also very difficult to accomplish because as an ordinary person you usually do not have the right to move a vehicle or walk on tracks. Imho for this to really work or to do it sort of professionally with good image quality, you would actually need to lease a locomotive, put your equipment on it, request a schedule, and lease tracks. Or, you would have to make some probably rather expensive contract with the usual track users, which these usually commercial users are usually not interested in either. So, unless you have a rich uncle or some little fortune to spend, I am afraid that “the president is going to have to go to bed toothless for quite some time to come” because not even Google wanted to fork out this kind of money for railway tracks.
Regarding maps.app.goo.gl/EFHc5jumdjLZ1Luq6 that I just posted. It seems it is pointing straight down. Well zoom out and tilt, and indeed, it is on the tracks.
@jidanni Although I do not know what exactly you are looking for in railway track imagery but you may want to consider another approach to acquire imagery for Mapillary (mapping or yourself). You can
search YouTube and other video portals for train driver pov videos
ask the video creators that they upload thier videos to Mapillary or
ask them for permission to do it for them
download the videos
convert OpenStreetMap track data to GPX
add GPX data to the videos or
GPS data to frames
upload to Mapillary
This is something I have already done one a few years ago as a proof of concept with a video from YouTube but because I am not a Google customer I was unable to contact the creator, hence naturally I had to delete it from Mapillary. But, it works. OpenStreepMap has a lot of railway tracks mapped, thus data which can be easily converted to GPX data (this is a huge time saving) to be combined with videos.
it is probably more and more rare situation with modern trains, when you can make sequence from the door window of the last coach like here: Mapillary
but I dont know what for you can use this kind of imagery? Just maybe for track micro mapping
better is the side view which Im registering with Gopro in the window. Mapillary Just need to check out the GPS signal quality as in the electric wires above and metal box around you GPS signal can be of poor quality. Add high speed train and it can be hard.
I didnt try it yet (want to do it on some narrow gauge train tourist service but You can use strong magnet to mount gopro to front/back of the train and operate it with remote. Probably you could do it secretly but watch out for staff as it can get you some problems as in many countries there are some laws prohibiting recording train infrastructure.
but You can use strong magnet to mount gopro to front/back of the train and operate it with remote. Probably you could do it secretly but watch out for staff as it can get you some problems as in many countries there are some laws prohibiting recording train infrastructure.