Tonight I spent my first night really diving into the data in my new Rand McNally Enlarged Business Atlas from 1903. What a great book! With it’s help, I can now see that I had much of the CGW segment from Oelwein to Dubuque on the wrong path. In the process of fixing it, I found the tunnel in East Dubuque that had escaped me for some time. I also found there were several stops listed in the book that were not in the schedule I had from the 1950s.
I spent several hours putting in all the changes including many on the Minneapolis branch… then Google Earth quit on me. I thought it was saving as I went, but I lost two hours of work. Ah well. It was much faster the second time.
My goal is to get all of the Chicago Great Western charted out to the 1903 standards before updating much of anything else. I can tell you that there is no way I’ll be able to put this level of detail into every line nation wide…. not for many years.
-Mike
