I was looking at a cement unloading facility off of I-215 in Salt Lake City via bingmaps.com and realized something interesting. Using the birds eye view, I noticed that the ground colors seemed to replicate those seen on a model railroad. Or you could put it this way, the model railroad ground cover techniques that are available match those in life so closely that you could almost imagine life being a model railroad. If a model railroader wanted to, they could replicate a real life scene well enough as to match those areas that they are modeling. Then again, that's the whole idea right?
That's the whole idea for the minority who are trying to model Wonderful West Podunk in exact detail. For others, the various mapping programs can be a source of inspiration, ideas and information for which they have no immediate practical use. Because the past remains visible for a long time in some places, it's sometimes possible to trace long-abandoned ROW like the Crown King Extension in Arizona. It's an unlikely prototype for anyone to model (unless the object is to climb up the stairwell to the next floor.)
Then, too, a vertical view doesn't always give the whole story. It will tell you that a burned-over area is shades of grey, but not that those bumps on the surface are actually the standing remains of dead trees. That's why the programs that also offer ground-level views can be much more useful.
Where I find the vertical view especially helpful is when I want to find out what the tracks do in a place that I can't walk into to find out - which can be the local complex that includes a concrete batch plant and an intermodal terminal on a loop, or the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock complex in Virginia. Both have fascinating track complexes, and both are visitor hostile. (For some reason, there are no horizontal views of either place available...)
Chuck (Modleing Central Japan in September, 1964)
On the other hand, overhead pictures of model railroad scenes look disturbingly like satellite photographs.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.