Question about track hight calculation

[SAUBER_KH7]

Hello Guys. I'm building (expanding) my custom route and I got to wondering: How is the height calculated in Trainz? IE: If I place the bridge height to 50 (50 above baseboard level 0), will that equal to 50 meters tall?

Sorry if this is a stupid question. I just want to make my bridge heights realistic on my route comparable to real world bridges.

P.S. I searched for a topic like this and I could not find one (If there is one, sorry I did not find it).

Thanks in advance.

 

[pware]

All heights in TANE (and all previous versions of Trainz) are measured in metres (1 metre = 3.28 feet).

If you set your default measurements to Imperial then distances will be in miles, speeds in miles per hour but heights will still be in metres. The ruler will show measurements in feet (or is it yards? - I always metric so the question never arises).

The baseboard size, regardless of whether or not you are using Imperial or Metric, is fixed at 720 metres x 720 metres.

 

[JCitron]

Yes your bridge will be 50 meters tall, which is pretty tall at 164 feet off the ground.

Railroad overpasses and road overpasses are about 13 feet or 4 meters over a road. This is pretty standard I noticed across the US.

For really critical measurements keep a calculator handy, but for quick eyeball stuff just multiply your height in T:ANE by 3, it's close enough most of the time. If the height seems a bit too close or too tall, adjust accordingly.

 

[SAUBER_KH7]

Thanks for the quick response guys. It's appreciated.

 

[SailorDan]

How is the height calculated in Trainz? IE: If I place the bridge height to 50 (50 above baseboard level 0), will that equal to 50 meters tall?

If the bridge is an ordinary object, it will have one origin point. If it's a spline, it will have at least two, marked by rotating circles. The height figure that you see is the height of that origin above or below the ground level at that point. For a single object, the point is typically in the middle - where the road under a rail bridge would be, for example. But that is not guaranteed - the origin could be anywhere at all, so it's not always easy to tell which spot in the environment is the 'zero' point for a bridge. For a spline it's easy - the circle. In addition, there is no standard for where in the vertical plane of the mesh the origin is. Some bridges sink right into the ground when placed on a flat surface. Others are at the standard height for the bridge clearance. That means you can't set the height at, say 7m and get a 7m clearance under the bridge - it depends on the local topology, where the origin is located in that topology, and what the vertical offset (if any) of the mesh from the origin is.

 

[pware]

What SailorDan is saying, when translated into English, is that the clearance height will often be a case by case basis.