One day I discovered Canada’s National Air Photo Library (NAPL). Apparently, almost since the advent of the airplane, governments have been conducting aerial surveys of places for various purposes. These were carried out from various elevations at high resolution. And as it turned out, I got lucky – they had one featuring Hope. The earliest I could get (or could find) was 1961, which was 2 years after the line was closed due to slides, but it worked for my purposes because they had not yet set about to dismantling it. In fact, a segment of the track in Hope would remain until around 1970. But seeing this was like taking blinders off. Now I knew where everything was.
The photo cost about $40, scanned at very high resolution from the original negatives. It’s black and white and when you zoom in close it does start getting fuzzy due to the elevation and limitations of the camera tech at the time, but it’s good enough to pick out individual buildings, bridges and other features. Further, with Google Earth, I was able to use still-extant buildings in 2010 and the measurement tool to establish a scale and better position things on the model. When I get to that phase, of course. 🙂