SPV Railroad Atlases

[shawmat]

I have collected all the SPV railroad atlases over the years, though not every edition. They cover the US and Canada, and are generally pretty accurate.

It turns out that the publisher and copyright holder (STEAM POWERED VIDEO LIMITED Company number 03093629) has been dissolved and the website has gone. Does anyone know how to contact the owner, Stuart Innes Andrews?

https://www.railmaponline.com/USWestMap.php is working its way west-to-east but is still several years away from achieving equivalent coverage.

 

[DelW]

That's a shame - I never bought any atlases, but I did buy quite a number of their videos, first on VHS in the 1990s and then on DVD in the early 2000s. I still have the DVDs but the VHSs have been binned - even when I still had a VHS drive the picture quality was too poor to be watchable on a modern wide-screen TV. I also still have a sweatshirt with a Santa Fe Warbonnet F unit picture on the front (that technology doesn't change!)

I imagine their business model fell victim to changing technology and streaming. In the 1990s their videos were my only access to watching US trains other than visiting, but now there are innumerable sources on YouTube, including live streams from many locations. Times move on!

 

[Taunton]

I've got the lot of the atlases, in a couple of A4 binders, built up unfortunately after I left the US and came back to Britain. Whilst over there there had been a complete dearth of any maps and atlases available, and these answered so many questions. They did indeed appear notably accurate, and I always take the relevant ones when I return there. A combination of the Ian Allan shop at Waterloo, and Stanfords map shop in Covent Garden, over time provided the full set. Quite how a publisher based in Kent managed this was surprising.

There was a programme on commercial television in Britain during their production about USA railroads, they might have even got a mention in the credits. Suddenly, at the start of the end advertisement break, there was an actual national TV commercial for SPV maps and videos, about 10-15 seconds long, the breathless script galloped out at breakneck speed over stills of their products. I wondered if proprietor Stuart Andrews, or cartographer Mike Walker, had read it out themself. Anyone remember it?

 

[shawmat]

I'm sharing a couple of links that were sent to me off-forum. They do a similar job to the SPV atlases but are, of course, online.

1. https://rail.guide/ It covers US, CA, and MX, current/abandoned, and railroad visitor attractions. There's less detail of yards and tracks than https://www.railmaponline.com/USWestMap.php but coverage is comprehensive and accurate. There's even an Android app available, though I haven't downloaded it.
2. https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1v-L17nf4_yle57AdOk4_VkiygI3bVQSS A Google Map which takes, on my fast broadband, 23 seconds to download and open. It covers US excl AK & HI, Eastern Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica and Haiti. Apart from the outlying countries, and a clearer index of railroads, it doesn't seem to offer much that rail.guide doesn't do. [There's a menu option to view it in Google Earth. Well, that took even longer to open, and it slightly exceeds the supported feature count of 20,000]

In both cases, they have background maps for context, which was always a limitation of the SPV atlases. The data cannot be exported.

But what do the SPV atlases do that these don't?

• Stations and other timetable locations
• Industrial locations
• Defect detector locations
• Yard detail
• An index (railroads, stations)
• Offline usability

 

[ac6000cw]

I've got a selection of the SPV atlases (mostly of areas I've visited or thought about doing so). For a a few years SPV did group railfan trips to the US - I went on the very first one (in 1996 to the Chicago/Midwest area), and Mike Walker was one of the guides - a great guy, and extremely knowledgeable about US railroads. He told us he drew all the maps by hand, using information gathered from and by a large network of contacts in the US and many personal visits - a real work of passion!