Engineering motor roads in Trainz!

[JonMyrlennBailey]

Ideally, motor vehicles and roads should be engineered to fit one another like a glove. Railroads ensure that rail vehicles and train tracks fit one another precisely. My grandfather was a civil engineer by trade in the specialties of road construction and excavation and infrastructure has always fascinated me. This is why I dig Surveyor so much. I think I would be a civil engineer if I could start all over again. I made this short video of virtual model railroading and virtual model trucking as a demonstration of how roads and trucks should fit one another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-Wuz5z108o


Who here has gotten their trucks or other vehicles stuck over railroad grade crossings and other places where vehicle and road did not fit one another perfectly from an engineering standpoint? Are the changes in grades on the hills of San Francisco so abrupt that a trailer truck could not feasibly negotiate them? I'm a firm believer in uniform standards in any human society.

 

[JCitron]

As far as road construction goes, we can try our best to ensure that the roads have safe stopping distances from railroad tracks and that slopes aren't too steep to help with the look and realism with it, but that's all it is appearances of proper road construction. Carz have no issues stopping while descending a steep slope or hill and have no issues climbing one either. You see, traffic in Trainz is just there for show. Carz move about on their own accord and are generated procedurally based on what information is available in the region config.txt file. On older roads, the number of carz and speed of the carz, can be controlled but other than that we have no other control of them.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

In Trainz, I have Carz disabled. Trucks are much more fun to play with anyway. I find working trucks as fascinating as freight railroading. I use the following content to have drivable trucks over YARN road content:


Truck Kenworth Primemover lefthand driver,<kuid2:97008:60262:1> by willem2

similar truck content by this same author

various semitrailers by various authors that will couple to these Kenworth tractors




I can control the grade, vehicle speeds and curvature of YARN roads over which drivable AI-controlled trucks operate in sessions. Getting the grades acceptable and realistic for YARN roads involves a lot of eyeballing. Getting invisible track with proper spline point heights embedded in YARN roads is tricky especially over grades and most tricky where grades change slope percentage. The tires of the drivable road vehicles should be level with the pavement. It is complicated and time-consuming to try to ensure the truck tire treads don't sink below the road surface or float above it at least not appreciably or patently obvious. It is much easier to embed invisible track over level ground for drivable road vehicles. Understandably, Trainz views these drivable vehicles as "trains" and the rules have to be structured as for rail vehicle traffic.

I design my YARN road grades so the curve of the road in a vertical plane is not too tight. I have the truck tractor connected to a trailer to ensure that the change in grade is not so abrupt so as to cause the trailer (bottom) to contact the tractor (rear fenders) at any point except the fifth wheel plate. I imagine that a real civil engineer has to design road grades for articulated long-wheel base vehicle to negotiate.
At grade crossings, the trucks do float up from the road slightly so that the tire treads just touch the tops of the rails. I try to have the tires not ghost through or sink into the tracks or crossing boards.

I have my trucks back into docks at freight stations, get logs, unload logs, serve other customers as well as pull into gas stations to refuel. Some trucks even pull into a truck wash to get a bath or into Dave's Diver to get coffee! My main YARN highway parallels the railroad mainline for the most part. The working trucks get as much visibility as the trains on my 1/10 scale model layout. The main road and main railroad line stays close tot he edge of the bench work. Trains and commercial trailer trucks are the center of attention over the route.


EXTRA! Look ma, no steering wheel! This is the in-cab view of the willem2 Kenworth truck.
This camera view is gotten by first selecting the coupled trailer, not the tractor, in Chase view
and then changing to In-Cab view. It looks like willem2 used some train engine interior for his
truck content. This is a great tool still for driving a Trainz route over a YARN road and getting a
driver's eye view of the layout. To get a driver seat (In-Cab) view in horse-drawn wagons, one
also needs to select the WAGON and not the horses. Using the Amtrak MOW crane truck in In-Cab
view, one can rotate the camera rearward to get a completely open view of the layout by looking at
the track in a rearward direction. In AI, having the In-Cab view set may cause these Amtrak crane trucks
to back up when they shouldn't or fail to back up when they should. It affects the direction facing setting.

 

[JCitron]

Yes, the drivable vehicles are great. That interior is from the old Red Hen DMU a red and gold painted Australian equivalent of the Budd RDC which they also imported. Before the Budd Liners were available in Trainz, I made extensive use of these for my passenger routes. Some of the older Budd RDCs still use the same cab.

I have found that not fixing the height of the roads is sometimes better to get them to conform to the terrain. I still flatten out the ground underneath though.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

Yes, the drivable vehicles are great. That interior is from the old Red Hen DMU a red and gold painted Australian equivalent of the Budd RDC which they also imported. Before the Budd Liners were available in Trainz, I made extensive use of these for my passenger routes. Some of the older Budd RDCs still use the same cab.

I have found that not fixing the height of the roads is sometimes better to get them to conform to the terrain. I still flatten out the ground underneath though.

I will lay the road and use the Smooth tool to get the ground to conform to the road. I then lay invisible track over the road. I work the track in Surveyor where it is visible. I get the spline points in position to get the track centered in the lanes of the road, more or less. I add my invisible signals, track marks and invisible speed objects to the tracks. I use invisible track levers (Russian lever) where necessary. I test the YARN routes with drivable trucks. If curves at intersections are too tight, tractor trailer trucks might get hung up. Curves might have to be broadened at intersections so the trucks drive off the shoulder somewhat during turns. There are parts where truck routes are laid over bare ground as in parking lots. Later, I have to fiddle with spline heights of invisible track serving as the routes of these drivable trucks. I use objects such as gas station ice boxes to check for gaps between invisible (colored in Surveyor) track and road surfaces. Initially, I'm trying to get the track level with road surfaces. If the invisible track flickers at spots over the surface, it's a tad too low. I adjust track height in 0.02 meter intervals. After spline points are sunk 0.30 meters below the surface, I also use a long string of drivable vehicles in a chain to check tire heights over driving surfaces. Again, getting track heights adjusted correctly in graded parts is most tedious. I have to sink the invisible track below the road surfaces minus 0.30 meters. Then I will test drive a truck and check it's tire tread over the road surface carefully using the Chase camera view held low. The tire patch contacting the road will have a small shadow on the surface where the tire touches. If this shadow is not visible, the tire tread is too low, sinking into the surface. The tire will look like a flat tire. If the tire ground shadow flickers while the truck is moving, it is very close to the correct height. If the drivable vehicles are horse-drawn wagons, the colored "invisible" track should remain flush with the road surfaces. Horses and buggies do not require sinking the track below the surface as vehicles with rubber tires do. Of course, bona fide rail vehicles, content that actually looks like RR trains, will have their steel wheels right on the rail top surfaces of visible two-rail railroad track. The Kenworth trucks and trailers require the track to be set below the surface by 0.30 meters to get the wheels in contact with the ground.

 

[JCitron]

That's an extra step you're doing. You can convert the roads to track and then just lay them down as track. In fact, there are "track" roads already on the DLS. Why reinvent the wheel if you don't have too. That's the power of Trainz.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

Budd RDC = train passenger car also functioning as a locomotive. The cab and headlight of this train car reminds me of a similar-looking special-purpose passenger car. I have been on the Caltrain along the San Francisco Peninsula, California following 1985. 1985 was the last year this passenger commute line was operated by Southern Pacific using gray-red-wing nose GM/EMD Geep road switchers and old Pullman heavyweight coaches. Caltrain took over in 1986. They then switched to modern commuter double-decker coaches made by some Asian firm. I remember seeing the mfr. data plates inside these then-new shiny silver aluminum cars then. If memory serves me correctly, they said the cars were built in 1985 and had the PULLMAN logo on them. I think the PULLMAN trademark was still used. GM/EMD F40PH (Amtrak style) locos pushed and pulled those trains. The train would run from 4th and Townsend in San Francisco to downtown San Jose and back. They would no longer run the engine around the train as they did with SP at the end of the line. They would run the train forward one way and back it up the other way. One older man on board in the early 1990's remarked that this train was a "pusher-puller" and not a "real train". He complained that this train was non-smoking. SP had a SMOKER car on the back of the train back when they were running this local passenger service. The end car during the backup run would have some kind of cab facing down the track. It had a headlight on the end of the car and a bell as well. I guess the loco driver could remotely operate the locomotive on the opposite end of the train here while observing down the track.

 

[JCitron]

This concept appeared around late 2004 during the heyday of TRS2004 SP4. I can't remember the original author. The concept was developed, and people ran with it with all kinds of road-tracks along with the now very common invisible switch levers and signals.

Your best bet is to disassemble, I mean open up and look at how the other track-roads were created. The config.txt file will be the biggest hint. I think the rest is the same as a regular road. By converting the road to a track, this removes the procedural vehicles, and you can populate the roads with your own selection and run them just like locomotives. Using slow speed limits and spacers in between a string of cars, a traffic jam can be created by an old fart tying up traffic.

Given the age of the YARN roads, meaning build 2.9 you should be able to make the modifications easily. The newer roads require a track-mesh and the other tidally bits to go along with them which takes the fun out of the process.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

I don't even know how to modify YARN roads for drivable road vehicle use. The reason I troubled myself to embed invisible track into YARN road is because I was only going with what I know. I need my trucks to run on two-way/two-lane roads and not just down the middle. I like the realistic looks of YARN road content. I disabled the Carz. They would not look good ghosting through drivable trucks anyway. Carz automobiles look and behave very unrealistically to boot. My drivable trucks slow down appropriately for tight turns and such. Since they are "trains", they are speed-controllable. I have not found any drivable automobile (passenger car/motor car) content. There is a drivable greyhound bus, but it is aesthetically unpleasing to me. So, I have a static Greyhound at my train station. I use static cars as decorations over the layout in places drivable road vehicles under AI control will not ghost through them.

 

[JCitron]

I don't even know how to modify YARN roads for drivable road vehicle use. The reason I troubled myself to embed invisible track into YARN road is because I was only going with what I know. I need my trucks to run on two-way/two-lane roads and not just down the middle. I like the realistic looks of YARN road content. I disabled the Carz. They would not look good ghosting through drivable trucks anyway. Carz automobiles look and behave very unrealistically to boot. My drivable trucks slow down appropriately for tight turns and such. Since they are "trains", they are speed-controllable. I have not found any drivable automobile (passenger car/motor car) content. There is a drivable greyhound bus, but it is aesthetically unpleasing to me. So, I have a static Greyhound at my train station. I use static cars as decorations over the layout in places drivable road vehicles under AI control will not ghost through them.

Take apart a working track-road and see how it's constructed.

There are a couple of things you want to look out for. The asset kind and the mesh-table if any. Since these are regular splines turned to track, that will change from kind scenery or spline to kind track. With the build number at 2.9, you won't run into the issues with the track-mesh container and all the fiddly-bits associated with that. This is Trainz as it was in the olden days.

 

[davesnow]

What a bunch of hooie. If you want to drive Trucks, get American Truck Simulator. VERY realistic, and they have trains in that sim, too.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

John:

I downloaded some track-road by tume and played with it. Some of it one can only place vehicles on one side of the road. It's not as nearly aesthetically pleasing to my eye as the thick YARN roads with yellow markings. Some of this tume track-road has two lanes vehicles can be placed on but I cannot use the Straighten tool or the Smooth tool with it. On all this tume track-road, I placed the Kenworth trucks on it to check tire heights. The tires look the correct height along the shoulder, but the tires sink below the pavement on the side next to the center line.

 

[JonMyrlennBailey]

What a bunch of hooie. If you want to drive Trucks, get American Truck Simulator. VERY realistic, and they have trains in that sim, too.

The trucks I run on my Trainz layout are for passive moving scenery under AI control. They are more fun and more interesting to watch than those dumb Carz. But I try to build truck routes in Trainz to run as realistic as possible as a passive observer of them. The trucks just run in the background while I play with the railroad trains. Sometimes, I will have my camera to follow a drivable truck around during a session. Other times I will have a camera follow a train around or a helicopter around. My heli is the Army Huey as an aerial observation platform for the layout. I can see my route from the vantage point of aircraft, truck or train. The trucks "usually" stop for active RR crossings using the Trigger Multiple Signals rule technique. Once in a while, trucks might still violate this rule and ghost right through lowered gates or even trains. The "drivers" in the AI facility seem to get impatient waiting at invisible signals sometimes.

I'm quite happy with my truck setup in Trainz over YARN road content with "invisible in driver" track embedded in it for all the time and fussing involved. I'm already done with my truck route setup on what hopefully will be my grandest and final scratch-built Trainz route ever.

I already have American Truck Simulator under a Steam account. I can custom paint my truck in that game. I have to earn money from hauling jobs to acquire vehicles and property. There is no "Surveyor" in ATS for scratch-built routes and I have no manual control over trains in that game. I have California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona and I think Idaho and Utah also. You have to buy add-on states. I have not played that game since late 2019. Since then, I've mostly played with Trainz and have taken up yet another hobby: scale-model building and airbrushing.

 

[davesnow]

Okay, Jon. Whatever floats your boat.