Mega Route?

[Approach_Medium]

Hello;
I've been working on my CSX River Line Newark NJ to Selkirk NY route for a long time.
I got kind of bored with it for a while, being that this route does not have a lot of branches; It's pretty much yard to yard mainline. There are a handful of industry, especially on the National Docs secondary in Elizabeth and Bayonne.

So, after trying to create a freehand route, and realizing that it is too time consuming to create so much terrain, I decided to download more DEMs and lay out another prototypical route using Google Earth and TransDem just as I did for the last route.

I first decided on Scranton to Allentown, PA, going through the gorgeous Lehigh Gorge. I added the branch to Hazleton, but that wasn't enough.
Eventually, I found myself with everything from Newark, NJ to Harrisburg, PA, and up to Scranton PA.
I have all of Reading, and all of the Reading Blue Mountain & Northern RR.
It's a really interesting route because of all the junctions and branch lines, and lots of industry.

Now, I'm starting to think that since my two routes have a common point; Newark, NJ, that perhaps I could merge them to create a mega-route.
This is really just a thought though, because I am afraid that even if I am successful in merging the two routes, there will not be a computer that could handle such a large route.
I may exceed TS2009's baseboard limit.
So far, the CSX route is about 320MB, and the Pennsylvania route is around 400MB.
I think that if the two are merged, the resulting route will have around 10,000 baseboard tiles.

Whether or not TS will handle such a large route is kind of secondary to the fact that it will probably take a super-computer to run it.
Forget about putting this route (or either of the two separate routes) on DLS. They all exceed the limit for DLS.
When I want to publish these routes, I am going to put them on my website, and allow free DL.

I am really curious to know whether two very large routes can be successfully merged in TS2009_SP2.

My more practical solution is to use iPortals to send trainz between routes.
It is very prototypical anyway, since a train from Selkirk NY (or vice/versa) will not go through to Harrisburg PA without being re-classified at Oak Island, and most likely another stop at Allentown.

I am open to suggestions.

FW

 

[danny5]

IPortaling sound like a good way to merge these two route together,that way someone can D/L one or the other,or both. You like to build routes of CSX would you like to build one from Newport News Va.to Huntington WV. ?Small routes say from Newport to Richmond Va. another from Richmond to Roanoke Va.and so on. all these have good side yards and would make a good coal run from Huntington WV. to ship yards in Newport News Va. Containers back to Huntington. Just A big thought!
Danny5

 

[Approach_Medium]

IPortaling sound like a good way to merge these two route together,that way someone can D/L one or the other,or both. You like to build routes of CSX would you like to build one from Newport News Va.to Huntington WV. ?Small routes say from Newport to Richmond Va. another from Richmond to Roanoke Va.and so on. all these have good side yards and would make a good coal run from Huntington WV. to ship yards in Newport News Va. Containers back to Huntington. Just A big thought!
Danny5

It is possible that I might be interested in such routes. The reason I am doing the ones I am currently working on is that I am familiar with the territory. When I get bored with these huge routes, I'll consider some of the shorter ones.
With my PA-NJ route, I was going to use iPortals to get trains from Newark NJ to Allentown PA and visa/versa, but then I found that I could actually have that trackage on the route, so now all I need to use the iPortals for is to have trains leave one route, and appear on the other, without the missing 90 miles in-between.

FW

 

[cascaderailroad]

Nice route...IM me...and also keep this thread topic going.

My route is also huge Huntingdon to Johnstown (Built in TRS2006 build 3337). I will also be looking for a place that will be able to host my route, as it is 567 mb (CDP 177Mb). I am breaking up my route into at least 2 segments: The mainline from Huntingdon to Johnstown, the Phillipsburg-NantyGlo branches, Petersburg branch (Muleshoe Secondary), the Wopsononock RR, and another, the: Phillipsburg,Drainlick,Grassflat,Snowshoe,Gumstump,Bellefonte branch's PDGSGBRR...etc...

Any advice you get here will surely apply to uploading my route as well.

All we need is the Harrisburg to Huntingdon, and Tyrone to Williamsport, (R Pearson is doing the EBT RR) and we will have a whopper of mergable routes.

Checkrail has a DEM route Harrisburg to Reading (mislabled Haggerstown-Reading)...if only we had Enola Classification freight yard. BTW "Enola" is a finished route on DLS, but is two times out of scale (2x too long, and too wide) but it is a really cool yard, check(rail) it out.

I portal is cool, as I could run a train into Cresson yard Iportal...close that route...open up the NantyGlo route, and that same train would come out of the Iportal, ready to continue on its way. My route must be broken up as it is beginning to lag (10,000 baseboards, takes 2 min to load, and 4 min to save).

 

[jadebullet]

Hmmm. I want this Pennsylvania route. It sounds like you have the Reading Shamokin Division, the Reading Harrisburg division, as well as alot more Reading trackage. How is the route looking right now?

 

[Approach_Medium]

Hmmm. I want this Pennsylvania route. It sounds like you have the Reading Shamokin Division, the Reading Harrisburg division, as well as alot more Reading trackage. How is the route looking right now?

Yes, I've got all of those routes. But I haven't even started with textures yet. I'm still in the very early process of grading the track that I laid in TransDem and exported to TS2006, then to TS2009. TransDem will not create track splines for TS2009, so I have to go first to TS2006.

This route is not going to be prototype. Although I have laid the tracks in their correct location, I have included most major roads (many smaller ones as well), and water, and the terrain has been created from actual DEMs, I am not going to do what I did for my CSX River Line route in creating the exact track maps, nor am I going to be concerned with what buildings I use.
It is a painstaking and tedious process to scrutinize close-in Google Earth or MS Bing maps to see switches, etc. I got lucky with the CSX route, as both GE and Bing maps were excellent for the entire route.

It will be a lot more fun to lay the actual track map the way I "think" it should go.

If you want, I can put my route onto one of the external DL sites for you to DL and have a look at.
I have my own website, a free one from GoDaddy, but I haven't set it up yet.

Do you have a suggestion for a site I could Upload my routes to for anyone to DL?

FW

 

[danny5]

If you decide to do a part of the route let me know and i will try to get you maps from my local C & O Historical Society.
Danny5

 

[Approach_Medium]

Just for kicks, I tried to merge my CSX River Line route with my PA-NJ (Harrisburg-Reading-Scranton to Newark NJ) route.
First time I tried with the CSX route open, and merging the PA route into it. Crashed TS (TS2009_SP2) when I pressed the button to create the merge.

Next, I opened the PA route first, and merging the CSX route into it. TS allowed me to merge the routes, but when I tried to save this mega-route, TS crashed.
I suspect I ran out of system RAM.

I didn't really want to create such a mega-route, since after scenery, and trains it would be un-manageable. So I will use the iPortals to get trainz from one route to the other.

FW

 

[rwk]

I just found this thread, March 2, 2010, and I'm doing the exact same route in Trainz 2004 2.4 using the Reading and Northern full beta route (which includes Jim Thorpe-Lehighton) and NS Reading Line both by Rooneth Josh Drumm with my own DEM generated with TranzDEM plus some blank DEM from the DLS like Phillipsburg-Manville, NJ. I have the Reading and Northern Lehigh route all the way to Mehoopany, plus the rest of the line up to Sayre, PA/Waverly, NY which is owned by Norfolk Southern and leased to Lehigh Railway. I have track in from Glen Onoko to as far as a few miles before Towanda and the 4 mile line from Towanda to Monroeton now part of the RBMN. I also have the DEM's in for the Steamtown routes to Portland, PA, Carbondale and Kingsley, PA. And DEM from West Lawn, PA to Hershey, PA on Norfolk Southern's ex-Reading main extending the NS Reading Line route westward. I still have a long way to go to finish the extensions to the route plus the unfinished sections of the RBMN route. The route is currently over 1 gb. The route crashes if I try to add too large of a section, but it can handle merging smaller sections. It also crashed randomly in the route going to a certain area in Surveyor, but closing and reopening Trainz after saving works I think although I don't know what is causing the error, too large of a route for Trainz to handle or faulty content. My goal is to have Harrisburg to Manville, and Reading to Sayre with Scranton to Portland, Carbondale, and Kingsley. Did you create Reading and Northern and Reading-Phillipsburg from scratch or use the routes from uslw?

 

[cascaderailroad]

Is that too big ?

Mine is 567mb, and @10,000 baseboards, and I think I am pushing the Trainz enveloupe by more than 2x...I think yours is much larger than my route...keeping it whole...intact as a 10 County DEM might cause problems. Most peoples PC's might not be able to handle it. Using Iportal, you could divide up your route into several smaller routes, and run a train into the Iportal, exit your Trainz route, and enter another route, and the previous train would emerge from an Iportal, continuing on to the next route...etc...etc...

My advice is to regularly back up your route as a CDP, and store it on a RW-DVD, External HD, Memory Stick...etc, just in case all your world goes...Kablooie into cyberspace !

 

[duckblaster]

I saw in another thread that Trainz can't use more than 2 GB of ram/page file when running under 32 bit windows as it is a hard coded limitation of windows from when a few megabytes or ram was considered a lot!

 

[rwk]

What about 64 bit? I have 64 bit and Windows 7. My route gnd file is currently 1.12 gb.

 

[duckblaster]

64 bit should be fine, the limit is because 32 bit can only address and use about 4 GB memory (RAM and page file), windows has 2GB and EACH application has another 2GB, which can be sent to the page file. 64 bit can handle 2^64 bytes (16384 petabytes, 16777216 terabytes, or 17179869184 GB!)

 

[rwk]

But whether 64-bit and Windows 7 can handle it, can Trainz 2004 2.4 still handle it? Because even if you upgrade to 64-bit, does Trainz still have an internal limit based on 32-bit because it was made for 32-bit back in 2003. I'm sure Trainz 2009 or 2010 could handle larger route sizes but I'm not ready to upgrade yet and risk something not working in the import over why fix it if it ain't broke? Also I use TranzDEM to create new DEM's and I'm not sure if it works to create DEM's for 2009 or 2010 although DEM's created for 2004 could probably be ported over. Also how would I know if every scenery object, train, track, road, etc. in the route would work in 2009/2010? So, I'm sticking with 2004 for this route and hoping for the best.

 

[Approach_Medium]

I am having other difficulties with my "mega route" as well. If I try to add too much detail to the CSX River Line route (it runs through a lot of NJ suburbs), the train movement becomes jerky. This is not a frame rate issue. It seems to be the rate at which my CPU can send data to the GPU.

I had thought I would upgrade my mobo, CPU, and memory, but dumped that idea when I decided instead to go for a new monitor. My reasoning behind that was I get a lot more fun from the new monitor than I would have from the motherboard/CPU upgrade.
That is not to say that I would not like to upgrade the rest of the system, but at least, when I do, I won't have to purchase another monitor.

As for the route; I am scaling back on the detail, and focusing mostly on railroad operation.
I am also creating a second version of the River Line, which does not include the suburbs. It's a "nowhere" route.

The PA route has been sitting on a back burner for a long time. I can't seem to get too interested in it right now.
I have been playing with freehand routes again. I find that most relaxing and enjoyable, since I don't have to try to match prototype landscape, buildings, or track config.

Generally, my interests in Trainz vary from day to day. Since it's a game, and not a job, I tend to just go with the flow and do whatever I feel like doing at the time.

FW

 

[SuperFudd]

What is maximum size alowed on the DLS for a layout/route?

 

[cascaderailroad]

I think it is 30mb or 60mb, something like that...unless you made special arraingments with them and snail-mailed them a CDP on a Hard DVD disk

 

[rwk]

Now, my route gnd file is up to 1.18 gb, 1.20 total for the route folder now that I finished adding Harrisburg, PA onto the layout using a beta route that was never released and the link isn't available anymore. The route had only gone as far as Hershey with my DEM extension from the NS Reading Line route, but now Harrisburg is in. I had to split Harrisburg into two parts because Trainz was crashing when trying to save with the entire Harrisburg section merged at once. I merged section 1, saved, then quit, reloaded Trainz, and loaded the route then merged Harrisburg section 2. I don't think I will go any further west, south, or north than Harrisburg since the route is too big as it is. That is, I won't try to go to Altoona, or Hagerstown, or down the Port Road toward Perryville, MD, or north toward Northumberland. The route does go over to Carlisle, and Carlisle Jct. with two rail routes (both Norfolk Southern now?) from Harrisburg. I also have to add the section from Laury's Station to Catasauqua which is a beta route as well. Then, I might be basically finished adding DEM to the route. I was going to do Reading-Phila as well I have blank DEM from the DLS but I'm not sure if I will. I wanted to focus on the Reading and Northern Railroad, but I wanted to include Reading, PA on the route so I used filler DEM to splice the Reading and Northern and NS Reading Line layouts together between south of Hamburg and below Leesport. I added my own DEM from Old Penn Haven north to Scranton, Pittston, Sayre, and Kingsley, Carbondale, and Portland, PA. fwassner, do you have any screenshots of your Reading and Northern route north of Glen Onoko to Pittston/Scranton? So that I can get ideas how to complete the scenery along the route? I do have some tree spines in, and a few other things. Did you use the uncompleted beta by Rooneth-Josh Drumm from uslw.com for the "Reading Division" part of the Reading and Northern (Port Clinton, Jim Thorpe, Mahanoy City, Ashland, Good Spring, Minersville, Pottsville, Middleport etc.) or create your own from scratch? I also added DEM from Phillipsburg, NJ to Manville, NJ available on DLS, and West Lawn, PA west of Reading/Wyomissing to Hershey, PA and a beta Harrisburg area route added on to that. Harrisburg to Manville is a major Norfolk Southern freight line formerly Conrail until 1998/1999 NS/CSX split, and Reading and Lehigh Valley before April, 1976.

 

[cascaderailroad]

You are now the King of the entire World, and are the new (Ex-MSTS2) Trainz PRR/RDG...etc... Project Revival Manager ! You must have several thousand miles of track involved.

I was so disappointed when MSTS2 Horseshoe Curve route was discontinued, so I started building my own.

 

[silvergull]

You have Mail

G'day fwassner,

You have Private Mail.

Silvergull