Google Goofed!

[Maletrain]

Sometimes I like to follow railroads on Google Maps to see what my layout should look like from 300' up.

Today I found this:


That is the old B&O mainline heading out of Cumberland Maryland for Pittsburgh, PA.

[aikorob]

I don't know........maybe this is an example of civil engineering at it's finest.

Judging by the mechanical and chemical engineers I have to deal with daily;  such competence would not be unusual

[Maletrain]

Well, if you scan back towards Cumberland, you will find that there are a couple of track maintenance vehicles on one of the tracks, and a train headed this way on the other.  So, either those track maintenance guys just recently made a really big goof, or this is really just a Google satellite image merging problem.  Otherwise, I am sure this area of track would be obscured from above by a very large pile of railroad cars.

[conrail98]

Very common with tiling used to generate the maps,

Phil

[Maletrain]

Very common with tiling used to generate the maps,
Phil

Actually, it seems to be an artefact of the approximation logic Google used to fit the images to their map coordinates that use a single line to repesent a "railroad line."  They seem to have used one rail of a track to match their map when coming from one direction and the other rail when coming from the other direction. 

Do those folks come from California?  Maybe they are used to seeing such images after their earthquakes?

Anyway, I thought it was funny, so I shared.

[nkalanaga]

They have (had?) the same problem on one of the Interstates north of Charleston, WV.  The mismatch was in the middle of an overpass, which made for a very strange looking bridge deck.  It could be either a tiling defect, where the images don't match perfectly, or an alignment issue, or both.  Not at all uncommon, actually, though it can be amusing.

[sundowner]

Nah, just typical CSX track.

[Scottl]

It's tiling distortion.  It is present throughout but most evident with linear features.