digital topo maps and aerial photography of PA online

[Jim Holland]

Greetings!

Derrick J Brashear wrote:
> (and speaking of which, interest in the Altoona and logan
> Valley system, anyone?)

	My strongest interests are Pittsburgh Railways (PRCo), West Penn, and 
Johnstown.  But I honestly admit that interest in the smaller systems of PA is 
definitely growing!
	Could the Pittsburgh, Harmony, Mars, New Castle, Butler interurbans be 
included with the Pittsburgh list?  While not (pittsburgh-railways), they did 
operate on PRCo trackage and carried *Pittsburgh* in their name.  Put me down 
for smaller systems of PA (and there is Harrisburg, too.)
	Philadelphia might have their own list and I lack interest there except 
for the Red Arrow.

> So I assume you guys know about the digitized 1:24000 USGS topo maps of
> PA, and the aerial survey stuff covering the same areas, online on the
> PASDA server at Penn State? The topo maps are in tiff format, stuffed in
> zip files, at:
> ftp://penne.deasy.psu.edu/pub/pasda/drg24k/
> The aerial photography in
> ftp://penne.deasy.psu.edu/pub/pasda/doq/

	Derrick and Don - we might need someone to hold our hand in walking 
through some of this stuff.  Have checked one USGS service out but think their 
stuff was in pdf format.  I have a small pentium and have had some problems 
with this stuff (hardware/software complicated by an *archiver* program [no 
offense meant, ED!!!] which I got as a freebie on a Syquest removable disk.  I 
was never told what the software was and thought that I was just transferring 
it from the removable to my hard drive.  However, it installed and immediately 
archived everything on my machine.  After that, the Pentium ran slower than the 
8088, 4 mHz it replaced - infinitely slower.  While I got rid of the archiver 
[program, not person!!!] and *untagged* all the files on my drive, it has left 
its mark and my machine has not been the same since.)

> For those of you who use Windows (I use Linux at home, and Linux and
> Solaris at work, so it does me no good) the USGS has map browser software.
> I don't remember where you can get it but if you go to
> http://www.memepool.com, choose "search" and search for "pasda" you should
> find a short article I wrote including links to it.

	Don't knock the Linux (UNIX) - it is strongly advancing at present with 
many corporate users now installing it!  You may be decades ahead of the rest 
of us!

-- 
James B. Holland
       To e-mail *off-list,* please click here: mailto:pghpcc at pacbell.net
              PITTSBURGH RAILWAYS COMPANY (PRCo), June of 1949 -- June of 1953
      Pennsylvania Trolley Museum (PTM) member #273; http://www.pa-trolley.org/
N.M.R.A.  Life member #2190; http://www.mcs.net:80/~weyand/nmra/