Old Swiss Aerial Photos

[Mol_PMB]

For the Swiss equivalent of Britainfromabove, you may be interested to take a look at this website:

https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/analogue-aerial-photographs

 

Click the 'LUBIS Viewer' link on that page for photos pre-2007.

 

You can then search for a place by name or zoom in on the map, and it will show you the available photos with a red marker where the number is the year the photo was taken.

 

Click on a photo and you get a preview of the image and the area covered by it is highlighted on the map. You can then download the high-resolution images for free. They're big files (often 50MB to 100MB) and you can zoom right in to see detail like this view of the buildings around La Tour-de-Treme station in 1966:

Or a similar view in 1991:

 

Very useful for working out how the lineside buildings and scenery changed over time, as well as railway-specific details like track layouts.

 

Hope this is helpful to others.

 

[Gordonwis]

A perhaps somewhat simpler 'at a glance' view of the changes in land use can be obtained by going to Swissgeo (  https://map.geo.admin.ch   ) and selecting 'journey through time'

 

An interesting area to compare (try 1864 versus today) is the Dietikon - Spreitenbach area 

 

For railways at ground level , you can search in SBB Historic for a station name and in many cases get some nice archive shots.    

[Mol_PMB]

9 hours ago, Gordonwis said:

For railways at ground level , you can search in SBB Historic for a station name and in many cases get some nice archive shots.    

There's a rich archive there including non-SBB lines. Some nice early 1980s photos of Broc-Village and Broc-Fabrique, for example.