'Mapping early Edison Film with current landscape. Film in the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/item/00694423 mapped with Apple Maps. Education lesson.'
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Edited
I was inspired by a link in the March TPS Consortium Update to a new Free to Use and Reuse on the Library of Congress site: Free to Use and Reuse: Ride the Rails. I decided to try mapping a trip from one of the early Thomas Edison Films. I had been playing with this awhile because the Summary of the film provided a nice turn by turn description that could be connected to a current digital map.The 1902 Edison film from the Library of Congress was created before the famous San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge was constructed. Although the ride is clearly explained in the Summary, the quality of the old film made it a bit challenging to connect to the landscape with today’s digital maps and the route is no longer there.
Using the names from the Summary, I searched the routes place names in Apple Maps and created a Maps Guide. From there, I made screen recordings of each location using the 3D menu in Apple Maps. Apple’s Keynote enables movies to continue to play across the slides from start to finish so as the train moved along, I tried to match up the route to the current Maps screen recordings. Finally I added the text from the Summary to the slides and then exported the sides as a movie.
I was delighted to also find a history of the train route in this blog post from FoundSF Cliff House Steam Railroad which cleared up some of the mystery of how the route looks today.
Mind you I only made it to the tunnel but it still was a fun historic look at where that ride could take you.
With historic films or travel guides in the Library of Congress students might map out a location and match it with the historic route to create a geographic understanding of then and now.
How could you expand on this idea of mapping a primary source train ride from your locale?
AND - Here is a super example from Mentor Soline Holmes on using technology & travel primary sources with her students:ArcGIS Story Map of St. Charles Avenue Streetcar Route
A very exciting train trip which you've done an amazing job in bringing to life! The film is even more powerful when displayed on Vimeo in full screen. Thank you, 
Cheryl Davis
, for taking us along for a great ride!
Edited
What a wonderful experiment, Cheryl Davis! Whenever we can make local connections for students, it almost guarantees the success of a primary source lesson.
I thought it would be fun to search for the Cliff House Steam Railroad in Chronicling America after reading about it and enjoying the photos, especially the photo of the workmen clearing the right-of-way. I didn't have a lot of success, but I did find an article about a 1909 thunderstorm that washed out some tracks there. It seems the coastline of California has been slipping into the ocean for a very long time!
Section of article about the thunderstorm in 1909
Entire page from The San Francisco Call (always available from a newspaper clip after you use the scissors tool)
And more about the California storms and their impact on the railroads:
Amazing 
Mary Johnson
! Chronicling America does it again! Love this add to the train story. Gosh that weather report almost sounds like this last week.
That sparks another idea for using Chronicling America, students look for weather related articles in their locale in Chronicling and compare to the weather reports of today - might be the start of an interesting inquiry into climate change.
I’ve walked along the Lands End path several times and have seen the wash out that eventually ended the railroad.
This is outstanding!
Ingenious. Kudos for how you leveraged existing tools to create that
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