Mile High Club

narrowgauge

92 year oldTrainz veteran
Join the Mile High Club at Ghum on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Actually, on the track at Ghum on the DHR, you will be 1.4 miles high based on virtual sea level and 1.3 miles higher than the Trainz baseboard datum.

Methinks this may be a record, what other routes can claim a 1.3 mile high mountain. Routes that start at a high level do not count. To count you must start at 125 metres and your rails must top out at over 2232 metres, not just a mountain, it must be a mountain railway.

Just a bit of trivia to cheer you all up.

Cheers

Narrowgauge
 
Good post. I never thought of the DHR like that, but it certainly gives one a thought in that direction. The mountain that the train climbs is one single mountain also, not several. The route starts out low and continually climbs upwards to Ghum, never downhill the whole way. Darjeeling is slightly downhill from Ghum.

In real life, almost every station is built 'on the slant' which would make parking rolling stock problematic. But, we built most of the sidings 'on the level' so you could do just that. Just remember to set the handbrake anyway!

Bill
 
This may sound like an elementary question, but at such a height, what do you always do when adding a baseboard, since the track level and default baseboard height have such a great vertical distance?

Narrowgauge, if you don't mind, can I be your first club member?
 
Not sure if it counts, but for testing purposes I have created DEM-based terrain for parts of the Eritrean Railway, 950 mm gauge. Prototype built by the Italians in the first decade of the 20th century. Starting at sea level in the port of Massawa, cresting at 2394 m after 110 km, and leveling out at Asmara, the capital, a few km later, at 2312 m. 2394 m converts to 1.49 mi.

For building I used ASTER and SRTM DEMs, an old Russian topographic map, my own GPS track logs from a trip in 2004, and Google Earth images. The whole thing was a test, so don't expect anything available in the foreseeable future.

For the prototype see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eritrean_Railway
Also lots of videos by various authors on YouTube.

geophil
 
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Quote: ... what do you always do when adding a baseboard ...

nicky9499: The answer is - we never had to add a baseboard. The whole thing was built from DEM models of the entire area and, once we added the trackage and included a "border" around it, we deleted the unwanted boards. It took me five tries to get exactly the area we needed before satisfying ourselves that we had the right route.

Bill
 
Ah, I see. I'm not exactly familiar with how HOG and DEM work, nevertheless, I appreciate your effort being put into this route!

Rock on! :D
 
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