THE WORLD OF RAILROADS PROJECT

Hello, and welcome to the World of Railroads Project, created by Colin Hakeman. This project is a collection of files, tracing railroad lines, that I have constructed for viewing in Google Earth.

The intent of this website is to serve as a hub for sharing these files with railroad and map enthusiasts. As a continued work in progress, I intend to update this website periodically as new maps are completed.

The files hosted here are ahistorical maps of a geography’s railways, organized by either territory or system name (and sometimes both). As the intent is to cover the main and secondary lines that exist and have existed, some of the lines that are contained in a given file may not have existed concurrently.

Main and secondary routes that lasted until railroading’s classical era are generally included. Industrial trackage, yards, spurs, stations and some long-abandoned railroads are not typically included unless they are particularly interesting (such as long spurs to mines in interesting areas).

While every effort has been made to map accurately, errors may creep in. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any comments or questions. One challenge with mapping on the incredibly capable Google Earth platform is that the imagery will occasionally shift around, rendering a line that once sat nicely between the rails offset by a few feet. By selecting the time icon and panning through imagery dates to the one used when mapping this issue will be eliminated.

The project kicked off in June of 2012, and has gone through several scope and focus changes over the years. One of the first project iterations was to construct fictional but engineeringly plausible additions to some of the rail systems. These files are marked as World 2.0 files and are hosted on their own page. To navigate to each page, please use the links at the top or bottom of this page.

Welcome! I hope you find these files interesting and useful. Feel free to share for noncommercial use, but I ask for the source to be noted if you do so. Thanks.

-Colin Hakeman

Latest Updates:

– Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and the Illyrian Confederation 2.0 added 11.4.23

– State of Alaska added, Short Lines 1.0 and Short Lines 2.0 updated 1.21.23

– 2.0 pages launched with Kansas City Southern, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man 3.12.22

– Kansas City Southern, Northern Ireland and Isle of Man added 2.20.22