Hello, need assistance.

[cascaderailroad]

All switch leads need to have straight track, or they look like a sharp "Y"...add another spline point right before the switch, and straighten the switch lead in.

 

[mjolnir]

mjolnir,
Thankyou very much!
Very good post.

I think now I have a rough idea of what I intend to do.

I live in the UK, but I have decided to make a fictional route, not set anywhere specific.

Since, on your route, you are General Operations Director [Title chosen because of the initials], you can certainly do this if you choose. However, (in my view) even a fictional route needs to be a bit more grounded. Railroading, both specific customs (like running on the left of two adjoining tracks instead of the right), engineering practices (coupler designs), and more general engineering (the general look of a bridge in the UK is different from a bridge in similar circumstances in other parts of the world; and many lines in the UK that are double tracked, in the US are only single tracked), and the look of rolling stock and highway vehicles, and to some extent (though perhaps less today than was once the case), the costumes on your virtual employees and passengers.

Im just gonna start, by having several baseboards going out. It is going to be an industry route, firstly starting with coal. At one end will be the mine, then at the other end will be the power plant. And in the middle will be a reasonably sized yard.

You didn't ask, but if you had, I'd have suggested doing this as three different routes, doing the mine the first, the powerplant next, and the yard last. If I were building these in the US, I'd have the mine and power plant on branches from a main track, with the yard (or perhaps eventually more than one) in between. And I would make a reminder here of my comment that once you have decided where North is, it will forever be there; if you change your mind, and decide you'd really rather have North be West, well, in real life you can't turn a mountain just because you want to either.

Of course, you may want to extend the principle, too. Make your first route a couple of boards that contain a bit of the main line, and the junction. Then do the few boards containing the mine, and the approach to it, and finally, connect the two separate routes into a third by adding however intervenient boards as you wish. Same way with the power plant: do the junction as one route, the actual power plant as a second, and then later, figure out how far apart they are, do the intervening boards, and merge them into one. This is the best anitdote I know of in Trainz for the "If I knew then what I know now" affliction.

If nyone has any suggestions, and/or tips for making mountain areas, they would be greatly appreciated.

Go to the library, perhaps even to the children's department, and ask for an book on basic geology, and inform yourself as to how mountains may have been made and the forces that made them look the way the look today. The aim here is not so much to turn you into a geologist, just to give you a sense of why mountains look the way they do in various places. Pick a mountain "type", open a board upon which you plan to put no track, and experiment with the landscape sculpting tools provided with TRS. And learn the limitations of the tools. For example, you cannot have a low steep cliff in TRS using the landscape tools. Even given the new, 5 meter grid in TRS 2009, unless the cliff is relatively high (say 30 or more grid units, the slope is going to be rather gentle. Learn how to make rivers. In TRS it is difficult to make a stream with low banks that is narrow. If you develop a board in which you're particularly pleased with your efforts, you can always incorporate it into a later route; for the ones that you'd rather not have anyone know you did, there's always the delete function.

But while you're experimenting with mountainous terrain, remember that more of the world is rolling hills than mountains, and I find it fairly easy to do convincing rolling hills with Trainz terrain creation tools. After deciding where I want a hill to be, I set the radius to the maximum value, and the sensitivity to a medium value, and build the base; then I estimate the approximate outline of the next contour, reduce the radius, and perhaps usually reduce the sensitivity, and build the next contour. I repeat the process of reducing the radius, and sensitivity until at the end the radius is at the minimum level, and I am using the height adjustment tool to adjust specific vertices.

And keep in mind the era when your route was built, too. At one stage, it was not feasible to remove large amounts of earth, and railroads tended to be more winding, since it was cheaper to build a curve around the mountain, than a tunnel through it, or to cut a bit of it away. A railroad build then will have more curves, somewhat lower grades, and shorter straight sections than a railroad built at a later time, when techology made making a cutting more feasible, and the desire was for longer straight-aways to keep the equipment maintenance costs down.

ns

 

[john259]

One other thing, which you've probably got covered but FWIW - make sure the choice of vegetation is appropriate for each area. So as well as a geologist, geographer, historian and railway surveyor, you now also need to be a biologist!

John

 

[dracular55]

Thanks for the help guys.

Ive got the majority of the layout done now, it is not huge, but a fair size. Now I just need to complete the scenery.

Ill post some pictures in a day or two.