Pilot Project

In order to demonstrate the potential of a temporal GIS, the pilot project will be broken down into two main categories. A "MACRO" project and a "MICRO" project. The MACRO project will focus on the wide-area scope of the pilot, while the MICRO project will focus on the more detailed and larger scaled historic data that is available.

Our MICRO pilot study focuses on Golden Colorado. Golden was once the commerce and transportation capitol(as well as the territorial capital) of the late 19th century front range. There is a large volume of historic photos and maps available to document change in Golden. The data represented here depict most of the late 1800's rail lines (green) in the Golden area. Note the short rail line up the side of Castle Rock, This was a tourist Cog railway that included a restaurant on the top of the mesa. (Not to be confused with Castle Rock City) The map also portrays a few buildings from 1870 Golden including a much smaller Coors Brewery. Historic mine points are shown as small green squares. The attributes of the digital data include Name, Beginning date, and Ending date as a rough means to document a feature lifetime. We are currently analyzing Bureau of Mines data to extract attributes for the mines coverage.

The following imagemap depicts historic locations of the Coors brewery, the Golden Smelting Works, and the Colorado Central Railroad roundhouse (as they were located in 1887)on top of an aerial photo from 1998. Click on the various yellow buildings to view hyper-linked photos and stories. Note the extent of the modern Coors complex!

Currently, the pilot project involves the following themes:

BACK Text description of the Golden Smelter Colorado Central Roundhouse circa 1870 Golden's Passenger Depot Coors Brewery Circa 1870