January 7th 2008 - A Tornado Meets a Train

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The Abandoned Railroad Map of Washington State

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As we've done for the States of Illinois , Rhode Island and Florida , we've completed a static map of Abandoned and Out of Service Railroad Lines based on the abandonments, railbanked corridors, and out-of-service lines in the State of Washington. Abandoned/Out-of-Service Railroad Corridors in Washington State, 2021. FRRandP creation in QGIS using Mapbox Streets v10 as a background and state/county lines from US Census data. Clicking on this image will bring up the map in its original size. This data was gathered by us over the last five years and is available on our Abandoned & Out of Service Railroad Lines Map , and where we had missing/incomplete data, we pulled data from the WSDOT GIS Data Catalog , who maintains a shapefile of railroads active and abandoned in the State. Neither ours nor WSDOT's data is completely encompassing however, as there are numerous logging railroads that have not been mapped, many of which have little/no traces left, similar to our map in
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Railroad Vocabulary: A List of Words and Phrases Used in the Industry - Updated February 2023

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As somebody who enjoyed watching trains, but was not an employee of the railroad industry ( at least growing up ), when I would interact with railfans and historians, there was often a lot of technical jargon that applied only to the railroad industry thrown back and forth that made it difficult for a newcomer to understand what they were talking about. For example, what is a dinky? It's actually a passenger train. This non-inclusive language seems to keep the loop closed to members of the community, and to uncouple (no pun intended) that technical jargon and help make it easier for people to communicate with people in the industry, I am creating a list of railroad vocabulary that I'm hoping will make the industry more transparent.  BNSF 2361 . Image: Matt Flores While I ultimately believe that such technical jargon has no place outside of perhaps technical communications between employees, I know quite well that I alone am not going to stop people from communicating in a non-i
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Abandoned Railroad Map of Florida

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For my third static map of a state, I chose to create the State of Florida's abandoned railroad network in QGIS , instead of ArcGIS. I'm trying to learn the ins and outs of QGIS since I don't have a firstborn son to sacrifice to the ESRI corporation for the right to distribute maps on their platform, so this is another learning project for me, just as the maps of Illinois and Rhode Island have been. Even as QGIS is an open-source program, there are some things that it does that are far superior to ArcGIS, although the latter is probably a bit more user friendly in some ways. Without further digression, here's the map! Map of the State of Florida and its abandoned railroad corridors as of 2021. The addendum that I add to this map is that while I'm reasonably confident that most, if not all, mainline abandoned railroad corridors are on this map, I am certain that not all logging lines are on this map. The State was heavily logged at the beginning of the 20th century
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