MapCruncher and the Stubaitalbahn

One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn.  This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking.  It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes.  So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D. 

So here is my mashup.

Although it looks good in 2D:

It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:

 

So how did I make this? 

Well I used MapCruncher.  MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification.  It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.

Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher.  I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping.  I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:

Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:

Simple! 

For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview. 

Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….