Anyone else use google earth?

outskirts

I ain't getting any younger.
Feb 13, 2011
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New Jersey, United States
I was wondering if anyone else on here has utilized google earth?
I have found all kinds of stuff on there, urban explorations, camping spots, abandoned roads,
possible squats, etc.
I have even cross references some of my finds with other maps, to figure in stuff missing
from google earth, like township borders and what's State owned vs what's privately owned.
Shit have I found some crazy stuff that way, unfortunately sometimes stuff looks at lot
different when you check it out it person as opposed to a satellite image. But none the less
I have made some cool finds this way, It just takes narrowing them down in person to know
that you actually found a place worth while.
 
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hell yeah, for finding a place to sleep and helps with trains. its a free thing and if it helps life on the road why not use it
 
I use google maps not google earth to scope out possibly panhandling spots but one of my best spots is still a grassy field on google maps. does google earth update images more often then google maps?
 
I don't know which one updates more often, maps or earth? I mean they are both google services, but I'd imagine
that maps is updated more often. Google maps is a good tool. A friend of mine once called me after he jumped
off a train in the middle of nowhere Texas completely lost. He gave me a street which I looked up on google maps,
but it took following the railroad tracks on google maps to finally find exactly where he was. I was then able to give
him directions to the nearest highway to hitch via text. Give me a computer and I'm hobo OnStar, lol.

One of the things which I really like about google earth is that you can scroll through the time line of a location
and see images from different years. You can see when a place was occupied and when it became abandoned,
or you can look at a forest in winter instead of summer and get a peak through the trees.
Keep in mind though, if you can see it, so can someone else. Camouflage your squat well, not just from the
eyes on the ground, but from the eyes in the sky.
 
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Yeah sorry i should have specified. The images in most places that are not very popular or looked at much are years old. So I wouldn't trust some things about them. If you use it to show roads it will still show a bar or line where the road should be but may not exist in the pic for years after.
 
rrpicturearchives.net is your friend. not only does it have a plethora of train pictures for those of us who, in addition to hopping trains, are also train nerds, but it also has a traffic density map (it's basically google maps with colored lines overlayed onto all rail lines, the colors indicating megatonnage per mile).
 
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very rarely, mainly when I don't have a whole country map or stuff like that. But Google Earth has made me do a fuck load of useless km and end up lost more than actually help me. so I'm on a personal crusade to destroy them ... maybe ....
 
it's definitely really helpful for nearly everything, especially for finding when rivers begin and end, and from that information and from others you can kind of guesstimate things, like where drain systems are and things.

edit: google maps is also endlessly useful, i think, in figuring out where the tracks in railyards lead -- north, south, east, west, etc. and to which towns they connect to.
 
I was wondering if anyone else on here has utilized google earth?
I have found all kinds of stuff on there, urban explorations, camping spots, abandoned roads,
possible squats, etc.
I have even cross references some of my finds with other maps, to figure in stuff missing
from google earth, like township borders and what's State owned vs what's privately owned.
Shit have I found some crazy stuff that way, unfortunately sometimes stuff looks at lot
different when you check it out it person as opposed to a satellite image. But none the less
I have made some cool finds this way, It just takes narrowing them down in person to know
that you actually found a place worth while.

Dustin uses it all the time.