[PRCo] Re: Chartiers Southern (was: i don't know who E.T. Brashear was...)

[Edward H. Lybarger]

Inadequate mapping is a primary reason I have embraced the aerial photos of
Penn Pilot.  They have cleared up errors in my own mapping as well as
others'.  And nothing beats knowing what you are looking for, a concept that
cannot apply to professional mapmakers...they're too distant and totally
disinterested. 

-----Original Message-----
From: pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org
[mailto:pittsburgh-railways-bounce at lists.dementia.org] On Behalf Of
galtfd at comcast.net
Sent: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 2:26 PM
To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
Subject: [PRCo] Re: Chartiers Southern (was: i don't know who E.T. Brashear
was...)

Not so scary as regards PennDOT. Maps don't show everything, and it's
particularly unusual for a highway map to show the course of a railless
railway. Scary, though, for how many decades we were limited to 1:62,500
topo up to half a century out of date.

At first I wondered whether 1976 had perhaps been a major redrawing of the
highway map, but comparison with 1965 puts that to rest. Still, over some of
the country, USGS publication at 1:24,000 hadn't been completed before the
mid-1960s, so is it possible that this information wasn't yet available to
highway department cartographers in 1965? Or maybe it's just that somebody
in 1976 happened across the track of the old railway-that-wasn't and thought
it would be cool to include it.

I have to say, though, that the enthusiasm with which I greeted the highway
maps online was inspired by the depiction of this one railway on the 1976
map. That enthusiasm was severely dampened when I discovered, upon
comparison with the aerial photos, how carelessly PRCo and West Penn were
drawn on the 1940s-era sheets.

Don G

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Derrick J Brashear <shadow at dementia.org>
> On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, galtfd at comcast.net wrote:
> 
> > Okay, I still haven't looked at the 1965 edition, but the Chartiers 
> > Southern
> isn't shown in 1957 either.
> >
> > So obviously the 1976 map incorporates new information, most likely 
> > from USGS
> topos.
> 
> Scary, since that's not really new information :)
>