Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

August 17th, 2026 — 4,600 words

Over the past few months, I've been working on using an industrial linear scanning camera to take very wide photos out of trains and ferries. Getting it working has been quite the challenge, but I think the results speak for themselves.

taken on the San Francisco to Oakland ferry in February 2026 (56,894x2,048 pixel grayscale image); scroll to zoom in and click and drag to move

More pictures are on display in the gallery

I presented a talk on this project at EMFcamp 2026 , which you can watch below or read on for the same story in more detail:

What am I even looking at?

The process of capturing an image like the one of the container port above.

The camera is pointed out of a moving vehicle and is constantly capturing a single vertical line kinda like these grayscale ones in the diagram, but a lot thinner. As the camera moves, what exactly it sees is changing. If I capture the lines from the camera quickly enough and stitch them together, I can produce a complete-looking image. It's a bit more complicated than that and getting the results looking good was rather tricky, but that's the main idea behind it.

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