Help wanted: Ithaca, NY rail history?

Any chance I could convince some of our amazing historic railway mappers to map the rail history of Tompkins County, NY?

A potential OHM partner, HistoryForge, has done some amazing work putting together replicable processes for gathering historical geodata. They have focused more on census records & extracting building point info from Sanborns. They even have their own instance of mapwarper.

I’d like to a) reuse their data; b) combine it with existing open data (e.g. joining the point data to footprints, where appropriate); and, c) sow how OHM can enhance the context of their data with built and natural environment geometries.

Railways would be a key help for part c) of this effort, not to mention being cool on their own.

Know anyone who could help?

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I’ve plopped down some initial rail history using the reference ISBN 0-943690-49-4. This resource seems extremely comprehensive (and available online in PDF format), but I have not been able to capture even the majority of the information in this book so far.

Currently low detail/accuracy but dates are starting to firm up and there is good aerial evidence of railroads.

It will take us/me some time to model the yards in Ithaca, as those can be tricky and change a lot over time, so I have currently omitted them.