Bear With Me

[deisan]

I have been in Model Railroading since I was 25. The current railroad was built in 1968. When we built this house I had a large extension added to the house with heat and air-conditioning. (Had to. Its in Dallas Tx.). I've been at this hobby for almost sixty years. After a back operation failed to fix the problem I was looking at the end of a wonderful hobby. I had seen the adds for trainz for a number of years and low and behold it now had multiplayer. Needless to say I've been busy the last four months rebuilding the layout on trainz. Town for town, industry for industry. (the buildings are not the same. I've had to tell my operators that I've run into problems and it will be another few months before the Southern Model Railroad comes back to life. 1. What is this business about having to build all double track and build each track the same way. One track left to right, the other right to left. Back in the 60's and 70's you had a lot of single track with passing sidings. How do you handle that? If I fail to get 6 LIVE operators I was planning on using AI for passenger or thru freight runs. Most of our sessions have mostly way freights out on the line, but the thru traffic keeps them on their toes. 2. How do you take a 74 square table top and reduce the width so that you join them north to south (or up & down) so you only have scenery near the tracks. 3. Why do loco's and sometime cars have "homing" habit. Locos back to turntable, cars to the yard. When you know that's not where they were last. I have a number of "I can't get it to work or add anymore signals but this is a start. Don Eisan (deisan)

 

[mjolnir]

First, sorry about your back, and hope and pray for your continued improvement in health and prospects.

The things you are asking about, the proper direction of track, double track, &c., are mainly for helping with "AI" engineers. I understand that one can use trackmarks and other devices to override some of these issues, but beyond that, and I'm outside my skillset.

ns
also in Dallas.

 

[Ricke82]

1. As mentioned above, I think you may be misinterpreting advice on how to lay double track as a requirement that you must lay double track. The route I am busily not working on, has about 35 miles of single tracked main with industry spurs, passing sidings, etc. and trains (including AI) run fine in both directions.

2. The simple answer is just delete the boards you don’t need. Be sure to save the route before in case something goes wrong, but there shouldn’t be a problem if the boards don’t have any track. The complex answer is to change your track plan. I suspect you may have done what I did a few years back and faithfully duplicated your model railroad plan in Trainz. I was less than pleased with my results and eventually converted the plan to a schematic and built that. I had basically an “E” shaped loop with two levels on the long side of the “E” (track above and hidden staging below). I eliminated hidden staging and replaced it with a portal on either end and straightened the loops and winding track I used to make the towns and industries more than 30 seconds apart. Operationally it’s (almost) identical, but It averages only a board or two on either side of the track.

3. I think you may be confusing a Driver session with a Surveyor session. Once you have created a session and saved it in Surveyor, everything will remain exactly like it was when it was saved (unless you make changes and resave them in Surveyor). Each time you start the session, everything will be exactly the same. If you want to pick up when you left off after driving a session you will have to save it in Driver before you exit and then resume the Driver session (rather than starting the Surveyor session again).

 

[trev999]

From what I understand, it is not possible to resume a saved session when operating under multi-player. Perhaps somebody with MP experience can confirm whether this is the true state of affairs.

Trevor

 

[deisan]

Rick thanks for your reply. The only question I have is when you refer to "board" are you referring to the full 74 square building pad or is there a way to remove part of the pad "board". Leaving you with say half that size to build out from with more sections of "board" attached to it. All the routes that I have seen with the game show 2 or more tracks in a narrow band with scenery along the sides. The tracks and scenery would not take up the full width of the building pad. The game is amazing but because of its size leaves a lot not completely covered. Don

 

[deisan]

I saw your ps about you also are in Dallas Tx. Have you been involved with some of the Model railroad groups in Dallas or Plano? Don

 

[Ricke82]

I'm sorry that I wasn't clear. I was referring to the "building pad", often called a baseboard or just a board. It is the smallest unit which can be added to or removed from a route (layout). I misunderstood your reference to 74 squares (a board is 720x720 meters, or 72x72 10 meter squares in Real scale) and thought you were referring to a 74x74 board route.

 

[p-dehnert]

You can't reduce the size of a baseboard, but You can paint the unused parts with a black groundtexture and lower the area a few meters.

Peter

 

[ray_whiley]

But why not take advantage of the greater space available in Trainz as compared with the largest model railway/railroad layout one could possibly imagine? This has been for me the greatest advantage of Trainz - together with the lack of additional cost once the program has been bought. And the number of models I can now make using GMax instead of card, balsa, plastic, glue, paints, solvents etc.

Incidentally, I find that there is no need to worry about laying track in a particular direction. As far as I am concerned, the only effect is that sometime a signal may be placed on the wrong side of the track - a simple click with the turn button (or whatever it's called) soon changes that.

Ray

Ray

 

[deisan]

It was not that you were not clear. Before I started I thought about connecting the pads together but it would take at least 8 pads. I thought that was a lot.

 

[Ricke82]

It was not that you were not clear. Before I started I thought about connecting the pads together but it would take at least 8 pads. I thought that was a lot.

Larger is not necessarily better, but 8 boards is really quite small for a Trainz route. Laid end-to-end that’s about 3.5 miles and, even at a sedate 20 mph, it’s only going to take 10 minutes or so to drive. I am not the brightest bulb in the Trainz chandelier, but I think you’d be better of designing your route so it looks and operates the way you want it to and not be quite so concerned about how many boards it takes.