A little bit of this, a little bit of that to make an industry...

[JCitron]

So kit bashing is great in Trainz too. Keep that in mind when trying to get that perfect building or suite of buildings for an area.

Here's a paper mill complex I cobbled together. There are those awesome components by Dave Snow, a water treatment pit and a gas tank from the Gaswerk, and a power plant from Jointed Rail to represent the main building. The actual paper mill was bulldozed down a couple of years ago and sat on the old Bradford to Georgetown branch which was stubbed in the 1940s at the Haverhill Paperboard.

Here's the original:

http://binged.it/1Kf6PTD

And here's my somewhat smaller depiction. I'm still plopping in warehouses and buildings thus the pipes and small brick building across from the tracks.



I'm not trying to be exact but I want a good looking paper mill.

A few miles west of here, I put in the Merrimack River bridge...

http://binged.it/1E6xChl



I know my bridge is wrong, but this is close enough for what I want... On the Haverhill end, I put in the third deck girder which once connected to a spur near the station. The bridge still exists, sans track and the spur is long gone along with the old coal company and lumber yard. I may put those in but I haven't decided yet.

If you notice the three small bridges crossing the road, Railroad Street to be exact, on the Bradford side, two bridges are for the double-track main line and the single bridge is for the Georgetown branch. This is just like the real deal. The twist is I needed to put in a wye because I wanted north-south traffic to be able to go east as well as west. A regular wye didn't fit well, so I did a bit of bridge kitbashing and put in a scissor wye. The bridges are the old JJS Pratt girder bridges which I found connected perfectly to the Austin Warren Truss so this is why I used this bridge instead of a thru truss... To match components and put a switch on the bridge, I used a bit of bridge track to make a crossover, and a bridge with no track for the wye leg. This allowed me to match up the components and squeeze the wye in where there hasn't been one since the 1890s, and a wye today is too tight for modern boxcars. The wye leg crosses over where the substation exists today. I may squeeze that in too because I can.

The Merrimack River bridge is a about 105 years old and is being rebuilt because of rusting components. This is the main line to Portland and hosts the famous DownEaster.


Now a bit east in Amesbury...

http://binged.it/1E6znLr

Amesbury is an interesting place. It was once the home to the carriage industry and played its part in the trolley car and early automobile industry. There was a single-tracked branch that came off of the old Eastern Railroad near Salisbury that once ran to the center. What is now that big dirt lot was once a substantial yard which served the mills along the Powwow River. At one time, back in the 1860s there was a plan to run a line from the present terminus north to Hampton NH. This never materialized and the line remained a lonely branch until it was ripped up around 1980.

In my depiction, I've added a bit more track and continued the branch through a tunnel where it connects to another part of my route... This area was quite a challenge to get right and like the rest of the route still a WIP. The slope to the tunnel from the yard was a pain due to the grid resolution even with a 5 meter grid. If only there were finer controls...

--- Amesbury mills to tunnel





Amesbury Jct on the other part of my route...




It's been fun and a challenge as I figure out to fit the buildings I want into an area. Kitbashing things together really does work as I've done this with the mills as I created a big loading dock below one of the buildings as I put two buildings together. The Sugar Mill and FMA freight house...



It's been fun now that the servers have settled down. In the end for me the kitbashing has worked because I don't have the energy to create custom content or wait and search high and low for those special buildings. By customizing content, even with a bit of editing and cloning I've been able to get most of the things I need.

John

 

[bendorsey]

Some years ago I put an idea in on the suggestion thread for the ability to mirror any structure that wasn't symmetrical in Surveyor. For example you could place two an "L" shaped structures on a baseboard, mirror one, then place them together making a new structure with no increase on the size of the DLS. Potentially 100's if not 1000's of new structures. Call it mini kit bashing.:hehe:

Ben

 

[mjolnir]

John, Screen shots look good; I'm really impressed. But, regarding your lament

... <snippage> ... I've added a bit more track and continued the branch through a tunnel where it connects to another part of my route... This area was quite a challenge to get right and like the rest of the route still a WIP. The slope to the tunnel from the yard was a pain due to the grid resolution even with a 5 meter grid. If only there were finer controls... <more snippage> ...

There are finer controls. Use your favorite 3D modeling platform, and create the grade down to the portal there as a building. , and then import it as a "building". This way you're not constrained to Trainz grid restraints.

ns

 

[davesnow]

Some years ago I put an idea in on the suggestion thread for the ability to mirror any structure that wasn't symmetrical in Surveyor. For example you could place two an "L" shaped structures on a baseboard, mirror one, then place them together making a new structure with no increase on the size of the DLS. Potentially 100's if not 1000's of new structures. Call it mini kit bashing.:hehe:

Ben

Man, that is a great idea! I wish they'd come up with a "Mirror Tool."

 

[JCitron]

Thanks guys, I'm glad you like my long time project. This is the same route I started back in late Dec. 2003/early Jan. 2004. This is new section I've put in to finally complete the project as the line runs out to Eastport on the coast.

Ben and Dave, this is a great idea. Buildings that can be easily mirrored is a great idea. We also need more long and thin factories, not those gigantic things that eat up too much space, but buildings that can fit between the railroad tracks and a river. This type of building is so common up where I live that you almost expect to see them somewhere when going through one of the many towns.

http://binged.it/1H1eRlp one of the other mills in Amesbury... The railroad was that trail behind the condos... Note how narrow the building is.

http://binged.it/1Igwg8t and here in Orange MA...

@Noel,

I've been avoiding the 3d-modeling aspects as I prefer to leave that up to the content creators. My modeling program of choice no longer runs on a modern PC - 3ds R4 for Dos.

 

[bendorsey]

Another idea I had a while back was splines that could repeat both the X and Y axis. A content creator makes a reasonably small building but does so in a way that it can look good repeating in either the X, axis, Y axis, or both. It would allow "fitting" structures into the space available.

Ben

 

[MeowRailroad]

I LOVE kitbashing. How do people not do it?

 

[JCitron]

Another idea I had a while back was splines that could repeat both the X and Y axis. A content creator makes a reasonably small building but does so in a way that it can look good repeating in either the X, axis, Y axis, or both. It would allow "fitting" structures into the space available.

Ben

That's an interesting idea... Splines that pull on both axis instead only in one direction The potential for this is great for fences as well since the user only has to unfold the box around the property instead of using spline-bit lined up next to each other. For mills and other buildings that need to be narrow, but have a decent texture this would work, but I worry about splines in Trainz. They always repeat horribly and distort weirdly at times like dmdrake's old building splines.

I LOVE kitbashing. How do people not do it?

It's a matter of putting buildings together in clumps and clusters, aligning objects on top of each other, next to each other, etc. The mill with the loading dock is a good example above. I put the one FMA freight houses down first then carefully aligned the mill on top so that the doors were on one side while the mill wall was down to the ground on the other.

Bridges can be a bit of a pain. For these I ended up modifying (cloning) some of the bridges to make some without any track and give me filler pieces. As it turned out, lucky for a change, the JJS bridges attached directly to the Austin Truss bridge. This allowed me to just connect the components, and with all being 5-meter and double track, I simply added a crossover track on the bridge with plenty of space to place signals. The wye track lead was a bit more of a pain due to some built-in bridge parts that can't be removed so the poke through the tracks.

The road bridge next to the railroad bridge is another mod I made. I took one of the Russian steel bridges and substituted the track with a road, and made this into a spline object instead of a track bridge-type. This fits well, but there's an issue with the old track guard rails because they stick up through the pavement and there's no way to remove those. With them in the pavement though they look like abandoned trolley tracks so it's not a total loss. In real life here was once a road bridge that looked like the one I used here. It's been replaced recently with a plain ordinary deck road bridge - one without any personality. Unfortunately I can't color the bridge due to the original creator using a m.onetex texture (built-in procedural) instead of an actual texture .tga file. In real life the bridge was that classy green primer color, although there was once one there when I was quite young that was silver like this one.

When kitbashing stuff together, you need to use your keen eye and fit stuff together that looks right. In the past I have stacked old factory buildings on top of one another to increase their height. To minimize any weird doors in the wrong places, I made sure these were buried behind other objects like stair towers, or put crane hooks over them to make them into lift entrances which were very common in the mills to move heavy equipment into the buildings.

John

 

[bendorsey]

I wouldn't think the idea of 2 axis splines would work with fences (or track for that matter) as they are normally made since they are pretty much 1 axis items.

Fence posts are usually around 4 feet apart but (sort of) 0 feet apart in the other axis. You would have to give the original item a certain usable amount of depth in both axis.

Example - - - If you made a small item as a 10 foot square fenced in area - it could be expanded in either or both axis to fit whatever area you had in mind.

Ben

 

[ish6]

Good Morning John --

Impressive pictures there, sir!!!!

Butler57 has a huge Marsz layout he made years ago, and he uses this method like a master! When done correctly, you can create new structures out from pieces of other structures!

Anyhow, keep up the good work! :wave:
Take Care now

Ishie