East Broad Top Route

[ebtrr]

Yeah ... Those tunnels are going to be hard to match. If you disable any "snap to grid" tunnels, which also disables the dighole, will revert back to normal for anyone who downloads the route, and all those hundereds of "big block head" tunnels are totally worthless anyway.

These EBT tunnels are all one of a kind, rustic, hand chiseled rock work, mouse hole in the granite/shale.

When I lay a tunnel, I end up using 3 assets ... a track running separately through the digholes ... then I add a tunnel spline that is under the static/spline tab, and is not located under the track tab at all ... then I add a static building tunnel portal.

These tunnels are sort of like mine tunnels, with shored up timbering all the length.

Quite intregueing this EBT route is !

BTW: there was a 3rd tunnel that was bored, but was never used, as no track was ever extended down to the proposed PA Southern route

Three of the four EBT tunnel portals are poured concrete - one arched, one square and one hexagonal. The fourth was natural rock. None are chiseled stone. Al three concrete portals were covered by roll-up doors since about 1918 or so.

There was no third EBT tunnel. The one you are thinking of was the South Pennsylvania Ralroad Tuscarora Tunnel. The EBT Shade Gap branch was graded all the way to the South Penn and would joined the SP grade at the west portal of that tunnel. The tunnel had not been bored through when JP Morgan brokered a peace between the PRR and the NYC that halted construction on the SP. Today it is one of the two bores of the Turnpike Tuscarora Tunnel.

 

[ebtrr]

FYI, I'm not a regular here but I am happy to provide any details I can. I peruse the Internet for EBT discussions disceminating information about it. http://www.spikesys.com/EBT/ is my EBT web site.

I'm not much into sims (prefer to work on the prototype EBT.) A friend did the entire EBT route on MS Train Simulator and had many buildings done - then he bought a house and had no more time to finish it. I had even gotten a copy of MSTS to try it out.

Please forgive the newbie question, but is Trainz Simulator 12 all that is needed to utilize this route when it is done?

 

[cascaderailroad]

Proper placement of Kimmel switch Sidling Hill













I just love making a curved switch !

 

[philip114]

FYI, I'm not a regular here but I am happy to provide any details I can. I peruse the Internet for EBT discussions disceminating information about it. http://www.spikesys.com/EBT/ is my EBT web site.

I'm not much into sims (prefer to work on the prototype EBT.) A friend did the entire EBT route on MS Train Simulator and had many buildings done - then he bought a house and had no more time to finish it. I had even gotten a copy of MSTS to try it out.

Please forgive the newbie question, but is Trainz Simulator 12 all that is needed to utilize this route when it is done?

Hi Chris! Virtual EBT aside, a big THANKS! for the website! You don't know how many times I've been on your site over the last few years. Hope it's ok I posted those few pics a few posts back. I'm building the route in trainz ts2012 so that's all you'll need. For the tunnels, I used a generic NG tunnel w/ rather crude portals just to get track connected across the hills. What I thought about doing was just modeling the portals to be more accurate and then just placing them over the portals that come w/ the NG tunnel liner etc. Then stick some bushes around them to blend them in LOL. The Trainz "purists" if they exist will be pissed!

I did a little work on tipple #5 @ Robertsdale today. Then I got distracted by trying to make a high res ng track and wasted WAY too much time with some stupid errors. For some reason the export plugin was renaming the textures so the texture files were giving errors. At least that's what it seemed like. Made testing a nightmare. That and I was struggling w/ the lod distance. I was also experimenting with a different workflow for building creation. I've been just dumping the models out as 3ds files and then importing them into photoshop and texturing the models all in PS. It get's a bit sluggish though as PS creates a few gigs worth of temp files while you're editing a 3d model. Now I'm just texturing in max, baking the texture and then adding some "weathering" shading in PS. Seems to be a quicker creation process.

Is there any kind of resource other than the wiki w/ info on the config settings etc. for track? A developer manual would be handy. Can one purchase any additional development tools from Auran/N3V? I might be interested in some tools if it speeds up my process. I've been trying to deconstruct existing assets from DS, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of native 2012 or later stuff in there and best I can tell a lot of it is missing some critical stuff and is only working due to patches. I've been casually searching for developer info but it sure doesn't seem to be out in the open.

 

[philip114]

Messing around with tunnels. This was more to understand how tunnels are made in the engine than to actually come away with good models. I'll replace the meshes/textures on these with better stuff later. Just needed to figure out the tunnel settings for the config files and how the attachment points are setup. I've still got to mess with the positioning. The tunnel system would be fine for a tunnel with similar portals at each end. Not so much with different ones. I might end up using the dig hole thing after all and put a liner spline between the points and then use static meshes for the portals. That seems to be the way most people are doing it?

I did these as a spline w/ the terminators on the ends. Kinda clunky. This is all in a "Sandbox" route I have setup for testing all the models. It's like an EBT in a box type deal at this point! LOL

Just had to figure out the tunnel thing. I'll add the roll up doors on the final meshes.

 

[cascaderailroad]

I think the locos smoke stack just about cleared short tunnel ceiling ... as the trains service was, there was not every day service ... smoke filled, teeny tiny mouseholes were acceptable, in the "Way Back" days of yesteryear !

Also think wing walls were kinda' short, were very accute angled, and the narrow tunnel side wall clearance almost sideswiped trains.

 

[philip114]

Yep, I'm going to remodel those. Took me a while to figure out how to even get the meshs working. I just modeled those portals in a few minutes to have 2 different meshes to work with. They're obviously wrong. There's a lot of undocumented stuff that makes working with these things take longer than it should. For example, it took me a while to figure out that the liner had to be in the mesh-table as "default" in order to work correctly. I only discovered that by "reverse engineering" existing assets. Also, the placement points and how they work. There's info on the track attachment tag but it doesn't actually give any specifics about where the points should be and how the meshes interact with them. Lots of trial and error testing to even get this to work. For the actual mesh I'll use the reference images of the tunnels to model w/ so the proportions are right. Not high on my priority list. Just had to get a working tunnel model so I understood how to do the final one correctly.

 

[cascaderailroad]

Passenger service was infrequent on the line, except for a sparse worker coach tagged onto a work train, or coal/timber/ore consists. Towns such as Kimmel and Coles at one time had dozens of houses on farms ... now there is but one sole house at Coles.

 

[bigboy4014]

all great photo's can't wait to see who finishes first, but in the end i'm going to have both on my game

 

[philip114]

Passenger service was infrequent on the line, except for a sparse worker coach tagged onto a work train, or coal/timber/ore consists. Towns such as Kimmel and Coles at one time had dozens of houses on farms ... now there is but one sole house at Coles.

Except for the mail run. quote: "It was also the only train whose equipment and crew were stationed at Robertsdale. It was outfitted with a coach and a combine and left woodvale at 7:40 am as No. 1 and ran through to Mt union arriving in mid morning. There is was turned and sent back as No. 2 reaching Woodvale shortly after noon." Also: "The miners' train with conductor Seward "Spready" Ott in charge, left Orbisonia about 5:45 am as No. 8. It carried miners' coaches and a string of empty hoppers and picked up communters along the line."

So yes, not much passenger service, but at least twice a day during the week you would see No. 1 or No. 2 coming through the tunnels w/ a coach and combine in tow.

To be honest, I just grabbed the first equipment I saw in the train list when I was messing around with those tunnels.

 

[bigboy4014]

"I'll get into the engines. I mostly built #12 already but it's way too high poly for a game. I've got the original baldwin plans for #12 and the plans from mrr etc. for 14, 15, 16, 17 & 18. I'd like to do the engines as high poly as I can and go all out with normal maps etc."

think i can get these when your done, i already have 17, just need the rest, we'll also need your buildings for this project if you don't mind

 

[philip114]

Yep. I'll be uploading everything as I finish them. I'm almost done w/ the station at Robertsdale. I started the engine house (loco enginehouse not the mine enginehouse) today and should wrap that one up later tonight. Once I get the route done I'll upload the whole thing. I don't know if anyone would want it w/ just the track? I don't want to upload a bunch of half finished stuff.

I reskinned 16, 17 & 18 based off the existing 17 model. I probably wont start on 12, 14 and 15 until the line is done. Wasn't someone working on (finished?) the M1? I'd also like to at least reskin the coaches that are out there. I want to make a flat, boxcar and tank car too. All those will be after the route though.

 

[cascaderailroad]

36" = 0.944 m

Is there any quality, high detailed 3ft track on the DLS, or elsewhere ?

The DLS is down at the moment.

 

[PBY357]

It was acutely designed for this route. http://trainzforge.weebly.com/track--trackside.html

 

[cascaderailroad]

1000m, the equivelent of 0.944m (= @ 36") track on the DLS, by: Joxemai #148561: Via estrecha tm 1000 mm 2 mts <kuid:148561:38004>

4m track spacing

3.5m track spacing

3m track spacing

 

[bigboy4014]

Yep. I'll be uploading everything as I finish them. I'm almost done w/ the station at Robertsdale. I started the engine house (loco enginehouse not the mine enginehouse) today and should wrap that one up later tonight. Once I get the route done I'll upload the whole thing. I don't know if anyone would want it w/ just the track? I don't want to upload a bunch of half finished stuff.

I reskinned 16, 17 & 18 based off the existing 17 model. I probably wont start on 12, 14 and 15 until the line is done. Wasn't someone working on (finished?) the M1? I'd also like to at least reskin the coaches that are out there. I want to make a flat, boxcar and tank car too. All those will be after the route though.

think i can get these loco's off you?

 

[bigboy4014]

actually sek_hakuna originally i was hoping to talk to you about this route cause i got your durango freeware and was very impressed with the work you did on it

 

[philip114]

It was acutely designed for this route. http://trainzforge.weebly.com/track--trackside.html

Thanks for sharing that! I finished laying track on the entire layout and just replaced it all with that track. Pretty nice track. I've got to work on the layout at Mt Union. Anyone know of any good maps of the area? The book is pretty good but it's very large scale.

Not much new on buildings for me. I got carried away filling in the areas between major points of interest with scenery yesterday and today. Mainly because I was test running the route from end to end and wanted something better than low res google earth images to look at. Nice work on the coles station cascade! That coles branch is fun as far as terrain goes eh?

 

[normhart]

You might want to look at pencil42's 36" 30lb and 35lb track, I rather like it and it is on the dls.

 

[philip114]

Mt Union:

Laying out the yards up here brings up the question of how to handle all the dual gauge track in the yards. I found a dual gauge track w/ standard and 3 foot track but of course it won't match the rest of the NG track. Also, the dual gauge on DS is a 4 rail dual gauge while the yards in Mt union were 3 rail dual gauge. I can't imagine all the dual gauge turnouts in the yard actually solving correctly in the game. Anyone have any experience with how the NG equipment handles the dual gauge track? I think I'll at least throw in the PRR main to the extent I imported DEM data for the area which is actually quite big. Enough to mess around with switching up there. Might keep the yards all NG w/ standard transfers here and there?

Still have a lot to do in this area alone obviously and then there's General Refractories and of course the Harbison-Walker Refractories further West. I think from the photos and track layouts I have of the area I'll just model Mt union as a bit of a "conglomerate" of the industries and trackage that existed up there. Even though a lot of it changed over the years.

EDIT> Just noticed the "MAN6 Dual Gauge Track" which looks like 3 rail. Says it's 2 track bridge spline made to look and "operate" like dual. I'll have to play around with that one.