Snap Map and a new home for my musings?

My New Home?

With the demise of Google+, I kind of felt like I'd been made homeless.  I no longer had a place to share my random thoughts and ramblings.  Reddit seemed the next best place, but it's not quite the same and I don't feel quite as accepted there.  I still use Twitter for brief quips and moans, but there's still a hole.

So, I thought maybe I should resume posting random shizz here on my old blog.  Maybe that will fill the hole that Google thrust through my soul when they nixed G+ (and don't get me started on Google Play Music...!)  Why Google has to kill off all of their best services, I'll never understand.

Anyway, let's get things off to a random start.  Where does SnapChat's Snap Map get its mapping data from, and who chooses what's shown?

Snaps, Maps and General Nerdery

Random runway in the middle of nowhere

I'm a closet map nerd and I regularly lose copious amounts of time looking at features in overhead imagery.  Have you ever noticed lines or curves in fields in the middle of nowhere and wondered what they were, what had created them?  Have you ever noticed how many former airfields are still visible from the air, whether they're now industrial estates, or farm shops?

One thing I've noticed about Snap Map is that it seems to "recognise" certain patterns in aerial imagery and show them as certain features on the Snap Map.  Here, for example, it appears to have put an airport runway in the middle of nowhere.

I know this area to be a trading estate not far from where I live.  I see lots of heavy goods vehicles coming & going and it is adjacent to a relatively major road in the area.

So, curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to have a look at the same location on Google Maps to see if I could also spot a runway in the same place.  And, sure enough, this little industrial estate in the middle of nowhere is indeed another one which has sprung up on the site of an old airfield.

Google view of the former airfield

As you can see in the Google view, it definitely still has those classic lines of a 3-way airfield.  But, comparing it to the Snap Map image, I still can't clearly see a runway exactly in the same spot.

What I can see in that spot is a strip of grass which presumably used to be one of the runways running roughly east/west.

So, why does Snap Map see this as a runway, but not the north/south or NW/SE strips?

Let's zoom in a bit more and see how much extra detail we can see in the Google data...

Now things get interesting.  This little trading estate in the middle of nowhere, which has sprung up on a former airfield on that site, actually seems to have something resembling an active grass airstrip!

Close-up showing markings on grass airstrip

On zooming in to the Google imagery, you can clearly see dotted lines painted on the strip and brackets denoting each end of the runway.

So, has Snap Map detected these markings and decided that this must be an airstrip?

Planes, Trains and SnapChat

Another thing I love to do on Google Maps is find and follow disused railway lines.  My local pub is around 500 years old, so it has seen a fair few changes in the small town where I live.  One of those changes would be the name of the road on which it sits.  It's called Station Road.  Now, there are probably thousands of Station Roads in the UK, but most of them have one thing in common; they either currently or previously led to a railway station.

In the case of my local, it's the latter.  There is no longer a railway station in my town, nor has there been in the time I have lived here.  What there is is a residential housing estate with road names like Railway Crescent, The Sidings, Signal Road, etc.  That tells me there used to be a decent sized station here many years ago.  So, to Google!

Aerial evidence of a former railway line

And well, well, well, would you look at those curves!

As you can clearly see in the picture, whilst there may be absolutely no sign of a station or any rails or signals, the landscape still bares the scars.  You can see the former line coming up from the bottom right of the image above (heading north out of my town) and curving to the west to join the main line.  If you look closely, you can even see a colour change where the line would have crossed the field just to the left of centre.

I have followed that non-existent railway line for about five miles through the countryside before losing the trail.  I think I've picked up the trail a bit further up the line, but I can't be sure and that could be a separate former line.

But wait, here comes the Snap Map again!

Snap Map showing the same curves of the former line

It's a bit harder to see (I've tried to boost the sharpness & contrast a bit to help) but those same curves are visible in the Snap Map data.  The line heading north out of my town and curving west, then curving slightly northward again to the far left of the image.

The line actually goes north to the next major town (with potentially a few stops at villages along the way) where it actually meets the line you might be able to spot running to the north east of the airfield above.  It doubles back on itself a few times as it snakes through the countryside when you follow it.

From the first horse-drawn trams nearly 200 years ago, to the last steam-powered engines around 60 years ago, the line saw a fair amount of change.  But it has been gone for 60 years, and whilst there are still stretches where there are rails and bridges and converted train carriages along its length, the only evidence that there was ever a railway in my town are the road names, some geological features visible in aerial photographs, and the Snap Map.