Measuring distances?

rwk

Well-known member
Ok, I'm trying to build a super route using DEM, prebuilt routes, and flat baseboards. The route will go from Philly to Orlando, using Farejoint's NEC and maybe the other NEC on the Wash DC end plus the Philly to Wilmington route with DEM merged between Perryville, MD and Wilmington. South of Wash either DEM or flat baseboards all the way to Florence, SC then DEM to past Savannah, GA then flat baseboards to the Jacksonville to Orlando DEM. It's just for my own personal use to drive Amtrak trains on. What is the best method to measure distances when using flat baseboards? The mile stick, and using internet maps to measure distance from point A to point B? Like using the map to measure distance between two points, then applying the distance to Trainz. If point A to point B is 31 miles straight on the map, then in Trainz I will place 31 mile sticks on flat baseboards to get a somewhat accurate distance. Doesn't have to be perfect.
 
Your distances are ambitious, to say the least. I have found that for shorter distances, I use Google Earth and its measuring tool to find both the length (distance) and angle (degrees) from point A to point B. Then in Trainz (TANE) if point A is a known point on my route, I can use the ruler tool to measure out the same distance at the same angle. Once the ruler is in place, I simply lay track following the ruler. The last step is to delete the ruler after the track has been laid. Of course, I am doing this over much shorter distances, usually in the range of 1 to 2 km, but I suspect the concept would work for you.
 
The TRS2006 imperial ruler is inaccurate by quite a lot !

Use the metric ruler as 1609m = 1 mile

A 1609m long "New Consist" can measure miles of track

Lots of luck completing a 991 mile long route ... that will be quite allot of gradients and curves, not to mention millions of roads, bridges and scenery assets ... not to mention it being a pretty boring route ... If I took the train to Florida, I'd probably sleep all the way, examining the insides of my eyelids
 
Well, good thing some of the NEC from Philly to Washington was done, and blank DEMS from Florence, SC to past Savannah, GA and Jacksonville to Orlando. But Fishlips forgot the part north of Jacksonville about 40 some miles so that the Savannah route could be merged with it. So, I'm just using flat baseboards north of Jacksonville to fill the gap since the difference in elevation is very small when you add on flat baseboards to the north end of the Jacksonville DEM. But then, I'll be missing the route from Washington to Florence unless I make it myself.
 
The biggest issue you will encounter in trying to merge together bits of routes from other creators is that they may not be in alignment, that is, a location that might be in the center of a baseboard in a route from one source, will wind up at the edge of the baseboard in a second. And at present, there is no way to shift a row (or column) of baseboards relative to another row or column.

If I were involved in such a project as the one you propose, I'd probably build it as a series of shorter routes, either connected by portals, or alternatively not connected at all, but using common terminal points. So that you might arrive Savannah, GA as the south terminal point on one route, and the North terminal point on another. This will have an impact on performance of your route, as well. Even with the improvement of hardware, processing movement of a train on a extremely large route will require orders of magnitude more computing resources than processing movement of the same train on a smaller route.

ns
 
I concur with the point about not over reaching. Hundreds of miles of baseboards, even empty ones will degrade the performance you can get from your hardware and when you start adding objects to give it a lived in look, it will only get worse. Using a series of maps connected by portals is one way to get around that issue.

As for placing objects and landmarks in their relative positions, place a world origin in your map and program in the latitude and longitude of a place in your route. Then using Google Earth to discover the lat / long of other places, find the same locations in your map. One way is to use my Lat Long Reader (on the DLS) to both read and mark the places for future reference when you can replace them with suitable objects.

Due to differences between how Google Earth and Trainz calculates the values, there will be increasing discrepancies the further you travel from the world origin in your map. If you're not hung up on exactness, it can be good enough.
 
As for placing objects and landmarks in their relative positions, place a world origin in your map and program in the latitude and longitude of a place in your route. Then using Google Earth to discover the lat / long of other places, find the same locations in your map. One way is to use my Lat Long Reader (on the DLS) to both read and mark the places for future reference when you can replace them with suitable objects.

Due to differences between how Google Earth and Trainz calculates the values, there will be increasing discrepancies the further you travel from the world origin in your map. If you're not hung up on exactness, it can be good enough.

You can make allowances for the errors with lat / Long by shifting the world origin as you progress. Known high spots like tops of mountains are good for that, just enter the correct values for each location when you shift it. The dem I used on my route is actually about 500 metres out over 12 miles and the height appears to be at the tree line not ground level, something to watch out for. Was also done using Hog which isn't terribly accurate one to watch for, yes there are better DEM's now I did mine 8 years ago, after a few years of manually carving the thing to get it correct'ish, I haven't got the energy to start with a new DEM although I have got Transdem (for the next project).
 
Since the maps are already disconnected, I could do just that. Maybe Philly to Washington on one route, then Virginia to NC or SC on another route, and Florence, SC to Florida on another route. And as for the merge issue, I'm not really worried about that. There are only 2 DEM's that I'm going to merge together on my route, 2 by fishlipsatwork from the DLS. Florence to Charleston, and Charleston to Savannah. The Jacksonville to Orlando DEM will be joined to the Savannah DEM by flat baseboards. And not sure what I'm going to do about the long stretch from Washington, DC to Florence, SC. Either TransDEM or flat baseboards with miles measured out with milesticks.
 
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