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I’ve used the 15′ quads for Pittsylvania County, VA, imported them into CAD and placed a symbol over each structure and organized them in layers and saved them as shapefiles. Then I’ve pulled them into QGIS and can query those. But what I want to be able to do is to work with Census data, economic data and other info that I’ve accumulated that is or will be tabular and stored in Excel and/or Filemaker Pro for use. What I’d really like is to see how all of that can be mashed and bashed into some form that QGIS can use to pull out subsets of things.

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What I could really use is some form of pattern recognition software that uploads a 30′ and/or 15′ USGS quad sheet and recognizes the railroad symbol and then creates a shape that superimposes itself upon it that can then be uploaded into a CAD or GIS program to map the hundreds of miles of RR lines no longer used. There are georeferenced 15′ quads and for those not yet done, there’s always enough info on one to do that the hard way so the hope would be to have the whole works more or less automated.