New source of historical aerial photographs

[Karhedron]

I love browsing old aerial photos for inspiration, details and just to get a sense of how real railways looked from the vantage point that we tend to view our models from. I was delighted to see that Cambridge have started work on digitising a collection of half-a-million aerial photos taken from 1947 onwards (so just good for pre-nationalisation modellers ).

 

So far only an initial sample of 1500 photos have been made available and they are fairly low resolution but it is planned to scan in more and include high-resolution zoomable photos eventually. I plan to bookmark this site and check up on it regularly to see how the project progresses. If they meet their aims of making the entire collection available in high resolution, it will be a real treasure trove for modellers.

 

Have  a look and whet your appetites.

 

https://www.cambridgeairphotos.com/

[Tim V]

For the Bristol and surrounding areas, http://www.kypwest.org.uk/ has aerial photos from 1946. Worth a look.

[sir douglas]

will definitely come back to this site one day when theres a lot more uploaded

[Wickham Green]

Yes, this'll be a really valuable source once it's fully accessible. ( Thanks for a topic title that's a little bit more to the point than spotting class 26s.)