It looks worse than it is - at 2% it's steep, but not out of the question. When the branch was built it was all coal loads outbound and empties back with the grade in favour of the loaded trains and it's still pretty much the same with the exception of loaded ethanol tankers outbound. The issues are a grade crossing at the foot of the grade and what is already a very deep cut just behind the camera. I can ease the grade a bit (to about 1.7%) without the cut getting completely silly, but the top of the hill doesn't look quite as good. This is one of the issues of using a DEM. Yes it makes life much easier but sometimes it complicates things. DEM data is generated from a laser beamed straight (more or less) down from shuttle flights. The beam bounces back and gives a dead accurate reading to whatever it bounced off, the problem being it doesn't always bounce off the ground! Issues arise in situations like this where the ground down around the grade crossing is cleared farm land, but the top of the hill is fairly heavily wooded, so the DEM data shows true ground level at the bottom of the hill, but more than likely shows tree-top level at the top. A truly ambitious route-builder would lower about two square miles of DEM terrain, being a lazy sod I just lay steep grades and hook on an extra loco or two!
Speaking of DEM terrain - I'm not a big fan of blank terrain shots, but this loop (not on the tiger data) was a blast to build (I need to get out more!) so I thought I'd share....
The location is the new Savatran coal stockpile, just a month or so old on the prototype and I couldn't believe it when it showed up on the latest Google Earth images last week. The inside of the loop measures nearly a mile tip-to-tip and eventually it will all be coal. That'll be a whole lot of coal!
Andy
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What happened???
