Gray - great job on RR map!

[Major Tom]

Gray - This is old news, I know --but I'm aware that you did a lot of work on getting the rail network right on the map. Last night I was leafing through American Heritage's Battle Maps of the Civil War and found a detailed map of the CSA rail network East of the Mississippi. Out of curiosity I compared it to the AACW map and found it to be almost an exact match.

You have an inconsequential spur in western NC that's not in my book (but maybe my book's wrong - it's not exaclty a primary source). And my map shows that the link between Danville and Greensboro wasn't completed until 1864, but since we can't build rail in this game it seems reasonable for the game map to include what was built during the war.

Anyway...I wasn't writing this to point out a discrepency but to congratulate you on what must be the most historically accurate rail network ever in a Civil War computer game (at least for the CSA, and I assume your attention to detail was the same for the North). I think the rest of the forum should know this.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Major Tom]

The AACW map is showing a rail line from Salisbury to Morganton NC (North of Charlotte) that doesn't appear on my map. Thats a two-region stretch, so it's probably not just that my map's scale is such that it's been left out as insignificant. There's another small spur just below it, from Charlotte to Lincolnton that's also not on my map, but that one is so short it could easily have been left out of my map -- I have no way of knowing if the map represents every rail line or just the important ones. In neither case are these important since they are dead ends.

I obviously won't vouch for the map I have. The illustration credits say it's reprinted from The Atlas of the American Civil War, by Avery Publishing Group, so there's no telling what the original source is.

That said...it's a really cool map, with the rail lines color coded by track guage, and showing which bits were built during the war (none longer than about 50 miles, the most important being the link between Florida and Georgia).

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Major Tom]

Very cool that you're using an actual 1861 RR map. I guessed that you probably had a better source than my map, and it sounds like yours is about as good as it gets. One of the great things about studying the Civil War is just how thoroughly documented almost every aspect of it is.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[Major Tom]

Thanks for the great links. I'm a sucker for atlasas. Just placed an order for the book, and I know I'm going to spend hours on that Library of Congress site -- didn't even know they had maps online.

[Gray_Lensman]

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[77NY]

The LOC Civil War web site is THE GREATEST THING EVER!

A few years ago I co-wrote a documentary for a local PBS station and we were able to pull some fantastic images from the site. The photo files are high resolution and translated wonderfully to video. And the best part -- the vast majority are public domain.