NSW Southlines Routes & Merge details.

Good to see someone still interested in these old routes which were some of my first feeble attempts. They were built with the HOG utility mostly with some poetic licence by me in sections. These were built with the oldest versions of Trainz and only show in a DLS search if you tick all of the version boxes. Unfortunately some of the assets from these early versions never made it through and so you get the missing asset issue.

I havnt revisited the individual routes as I have merged them all into my mega South NSW route with other sections from other route builders inclusing Graemes excellent efforts. The current NSW South version runs well in TANE SP4 and TRS2019 with many of the scenery items updated to more modern and better versions, especially trees. It has the main line from Picton to Albury and all available branch lines and Timthetoolman’s routes to Cowra and Grenfell. I hope to get some of the Vic routes merged in soon.
You definitely need lots of RAM (32Gb at least) to do the merge once the routes get very big. I had to upgrade RAM to merge in the Stockingbingle route. My current version shows as just under 500Mb in CM.
Ive now moved on to North NSW with Armidale to Wallangarrah well under way and based on 5M DEM via TransDEM which produces unbelievable topology detail.

Good luck,
PG

The good old days when a child

PGibbons said:

Good to see someone still interested in these old routes which were some of my first feeble attempts. They were built with the HOG utility mostly with some poetic licence by me in sections. These were built with the oldest versions of Trainz and only show in a DLS search if you tick all of the version boxes. Unfortunately some of the assets from these early versions never made it through and so you get the missing asset issue.

I havnt revisited the individual routes as I have merged them all into my mega South NSW route with other sections from other route builders inclusing Graemes excellent efforts. The current NSW South version runs well in TANE SP4 and TRS2019 with many of the scenery items updated to more modern and better versions, especially trees. It has the main line from Picton to Albury and all available branch lines and Timthetoolman’s routes to Cowra and Grenfell. I hope to get some of the Vic routes merged in soon.
You definitely need lots of RAM (32Gb at least) to do the merge once the routes get very big. I had to upgrade RAM to merge in the Stockingbingle route. My current version shows as just under 500Mb in CM.
Ive now moved on to North NSW with Armidale to Wallangarrah well under way and based on 5M DEM via TransDEM which produces unbelievable topology detail.

Good luck,
PG

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It was just great going back to these locations. They have stood the times well and I would love to set them up for operations using JMRI software.

However many of the steam locomotives have not fared so well.

As a young teenager in the early sixties I chased trains all over NSW from a southern Sydney base. I even had a regular experience on the Friday night milk train riding on a 36 class (known as a pig because they were rough riding) part of the way to Bomaderry south coast. The fireman would go back to the guards van to play poker and I would fire the engine strictly illegal even then !

I have taken a couple of the routes and updated them as much as I could to TRS19 standards including PBR and TurfFX. However I find the performance of the NSWGR steam locomotives leaves much to desire as does the appearance. Rolling stock in many cases is OK.

Diesels from that time 44, 45, 79, 42 class etc. all seem to work better but my interest is in the steam.

I did compare some of the locations modelled with photos of that time that I personally took and they are remarkably accurate in the main. I had detail images of Dubbo depot including the steam locomotives the local crew painted green and blue (without official permission I believe).

Well done Mr Gibbons.

I live in country Queensland these days so using your routes to go back has proven very enjoyable.

I wish the quality of the steamers had kept up as well.

I generally work with US routes of my own making, as I had a stint there in the USA in the 1970's but would love to develop/update NSW routes if only the locomotive stock was better. I can work on the routes (for my own use) but locomotives . . . . not me.


I don't have the skills to upgrade the Steam Locomotives sadly.

render2017 said:

I have tried to download the Picton to Goulburn route to TRS2019 and it loads with just a couple of missing assets that i have since loaded.
It shows no errors, but all track is just showing dotted lines.
I have seen this before but don't know how to fix or overcome this missing track.
Can someone help me understand what I can do.

I have downloaded a couple of small NSWGR routes before and easily updated the track and other items to a reasonable state but I am stuck without track on this route.

Hope someone can help

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Colin If you read my post above your one i quote you will find that all maps are available in download manager and then if with each one in content manager you do a recursive listing of all missing dependencies you will locate all the tracks and be able to then download them and what i then do is use the bulk asset replacement on each map section or when all assembled the whole map to replace the track with my chosen track option do same with point switches lights/semaphores as i am making this into a what if line where rail is becoming again more used than planes or private transport over longer distances (imagine an oil crisis time where cars are only economic for small trips and planes are too expensive except for emergency travel).

The other thing you will need to fix are many of the maps use pre TANE colouring which nin many cases under TANE are blindingly bright so you will need to go through as time or your eyes demand and fix them they run well and where not always good for straight through running say from Albury to Picton or the northern portals due to trains taking strange routes or getting stuck in strange places they should never go into like through the yards at Coots instead of keeping to main line to station and then continue along main line up. I am slowly trying to plot paths for each type of consist to use so i can just set it all to follow paths and work or i can run specials or any thing i like with having other trains to interact with.

Even after you do download everything available from the DLS for all these maps you will find you will still have many UNKNOWN assets which as you make mod files from downloaded ones will be easily fixed using the delete all missing assets in surveyer there is one map which i found will give heaps of warnings and missingassets you cant delete this way and what i found is it is a fault in the text config file which can be accessed from open in text mode in content manager and you will see there is like a kuid table which is right against the edge of the page on the left if you delete all this listing that is against the very edge of page and not under a kuid table list it will fix the problem and the map will work perfect.

I have just spent the last 4 days doing all this to these maps as i have as my post recently states had to redownload all this myself and am in the middle of fixing it all together myself.

Aussie Routes are great, Aussie Steam not so great

beckster181 said:

Colin If you read my post above your one i quote you will find that all maps are available in download manager and then if with each one in content manager you do a recursive listing of all missing dependencies you will locate all the tracks and be able to then download them and what i then do is use the bulk asset replacement on each map section or when all assembled the whole map to replace the track with my chosen track option do same with point switches lights/semaphores as i am making this into a what if line where rail is becoming again more used than planes or private transport over longer distances (imagine an oil crisis time where cars are only economic for small trips and planes are too expensive except for emergency travel).

The other thing you will need to fix are many of the maps use pre TANE colouring which nin many cases under TANE are blindingly bright so you will need to go through as time or your eyes demand and fix them they run well and where not always good for straight through running say from Albury to Picton or the northern portals due to trains taking strange routes or getting stuck in strange places they should never go into like through the yards at Coots instead of keeping to main line to station and then continue along main line up. I am slowly trying to plot paths for each type of consist to use so i can just set it all to follow paths and work or i can run specials or any thing i like with having other trains to interact with.

Even after you do download everything available from the DLS for all these maps you will find you will still have many UNKNOWN assets which as you make mod files from downloaded ones will be easily fixed using the delete all missing assets in surveyer there is one map which i found will give heaps of warnings and missingassets you cant delete this way and what i found is it is a fault in the text config file which can be accessed from open in text mode in content manager and you will see there is like a kuid table which is right against the edge of the page on the left if you delete all this listing that is against the very edge of page and not under a kuid table list it will fix the problem and the map will work perfect.

I have just spent the last 4 days doing all this to these maps as i have as my post recently states had to redownload all this myself and am in the middle of fixing it all together myself.

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Your premise on Future resurgence of trains is imaginative and is eerily realistic in these Covid times with 90% of aircraft grounded around the globe. Sadly trains cannot travel overseas very well.

I assume your routing issues are related to AI trains, if not it could only be due to the signals not showing the correct diversion . . . I guess.

I have done a TRS19 update on a couple of smaller sections of PGibbons routes, and can see the potential, particularly those with dem topology included.

However I am disappointed with the steam locomotives compared to some others from USA and in particularly the UK where they have simply so realistic physics and operation wise as well as absolutely gorgeous looking.

The steamers from K&L Trainz in USA lately have come close to the UK counterparts in many ways, with the inside cab look being the only negative, but I believe Steve Lerro is embarking on an upgrade to the cabs after finally working out how to do it. His sounds after mostly first class with only a couple of the older models having the occasional hiccup.

Wish you luck in your massive job on these routes.

My biggest (literally)problem will be when our Illawarra/South Coast route is finished. I want to be able to add it to the rest of the NSW Mega Route but it may be too big for even 32 gb RAM and I haven't got Phil's latest offering attached yet...too much surgery, I might have to make a new one.
Graeme

Thanks for the follow up Colin. Yes your right it is the AI or trains working through a list of stations or markers to get from point A to point B. Its like they try to pick the straightest route but dont take into account direction markers or priority limits etc. so just having fun and playing with it and having fun At one point i had got the whole MSL upgraded to 4 tracks 2 high speed lines with limited stops and the other 2 lines doing the same as the line is today with bot limited stopping and stops all stations all feeding the high speed lines which would only stop at large regional stations so all branch lines fed to main line where another train would pick up to take people to the nearest large regional station to then have them transfer to high speed trains I had electrified the whole line and the H/S line was running bullet trains of a couple different versions for the express and regional pickup services with other types of electrics running the branches and such and then the freight was all electric on the slow lines and were having to stop for passenger trains as they were faster than the freight.
It was working well except for the fact these more automated trains would go off their best lines and end up usually in a yard or some other dead end and sit there till i saw them and took over and got them back onto line they were ment to be on. where this was most noticeable was at Coota and Junee as the trains would decide the shortest/ quickest route was to go into the yard which have 40 or lower KPH limits where the express line was at 250 and slow lines were 160 all in KPH and just as i was starting to work on paths for each station for each type of train the hard drive this was all stored on decided it wanted a holiday and these files ended up corrupted. i i tried to restore from the archi9ve files i hD CREATED IN TRAINZ/TANE which ever version it was from and found it would restore them but then it would not lrt me open them due to some fault about build version or such so had to start all over and had just got all track replaced on the last attempt and making the gradients more suitable when windows had one of its crap outs and reformated my games storage drive and wiped everything totally so it is a long process but also one that shows why i hate windows so much LOL.

Luckily as i am now fully retired not just semi on a disability pension i have more time than i ever had before to work on this and hope that with the latest restart i should have it running well in a few months then the big trick is to make all the colours look good and not burn your eyeballs out with how bright the early colours look in TANE think 2019 would work well also but i have reached my limit with buying versions of this game and I only have Tane as it was a birthday present from my son LOL and as i have the deluxe stand alone version i never have to worry if they stop supporting it online.

I also took a look at Grashlash's Seymour to Bethanga map as well which looks great and is semi recent based as i now live in Ballarat and at various times have lived in Wagga Seymour Albury/Wodonga and have travelled this line many times to Melbourne and Sydney. I think you can see where my interest in this line comes from.

LOL your like me why settle for one route /line when you can have it ALL! the biggest memory killer is how much you make the route have similar to real life ground cover with trees and bushes. I have 32 gig ram also but it is an older system AMD Bulldozer CPU and while it can open and run large routes well sometimes the merging is where it falls over when the RAM gets upto 97% usage by TANE since windows is such a ram hog and hates to let programs use it all for too long. my son is just upgrading his system to ryzen last gen cpu and 32 gig of DDR4 so may try to borrow it to do my merges on lol.

Hi All,

I have just about finished a complete merge and removal of non download station dependencies of this Main South Line so it runs perfect in TANE.

Due to the fact that the approval process for TANE content is now so long and I have no interest in going further into TRAINZ in the foreseeable future, I have decided that i will upload the CDP for the complete map and a test session and 2 txt files that will include a list of all stations in order and the names of all branch stations also in order.

The main thing that will be left for you to do to finish the maps is to replace the removed ground textures which I have not started yet. The idea is that this will run on older computers (mine is an old AMD 8 core bulldozer CPU with 32 gig of RAM and an older Radeon RX 580 GPU. There are also some flying trees that just need to be made to get back on the ground which is just a click on them with the height adjustment in the building tab.

I am in the process of making ALL stations working in TANE so you can pick up and drop off passengers at all stations. And checking each line is complete and has no broken connections or other problems which you can then easily check once downloaded and installed in your TANE version by running the session i will include which will run a train on every line so you can easily find any problem that may happen.

What I am looking for is if there is many if any at all that would like to get this from me as it will just be uploaded to some cloud storage that i will be able to give access to for those that want it. If there is no people wanting this help to get this great combo map on their system then i wont bother to do the upload to the cloud and no problems.

So if any of you are interested could you either let me know through here or by emailing me at beckster181@hotmail.com so i can see what sort of need i may be able to fill.

Thanks for your reading this and taking the time to let me know if you want this CDP.

Beckster

Beckster
Good to see someone (a fellow enthusiast or fanatic) still interested in South NSW routes.
Ive gradually merged and updated content in the mega route over the years and still enjoy running various sessions throughout the route.

There are also a few more routes available since the original list such as Holbrook Branch, Stockingbingle , and Blayney to Cowra as well as the routes in Vic which can all be merged if yout PC is up to it. I certainly recommend 64Gb of RAM if you atempt this.

Good luck.
PG

Thanks PGibbons, its great to have such a large base to work with that merges so well which goes back to the people like you and the rest that made these maps in the first place.

Yeah I am both of the things you picked to describe me a fanatic and enthusiast for ALL Aussie rail and see all the closures over the years as just driving away possible passengers and freight which then makes the situation worse not better.

My ultimate goal with my build for MSL is to make it into a large good profit line and run it under the premise that for some reason (lack of fuel for long distance travel or climate control regulations etc) that for freight or passengers to get the long distances it requires trains to move them.

This will enable me to run all ages of traffic on the line from steam right through to latest electric etc. Making it a what if situation but on basically real life tracks. This will require upgrading things to make it a 4 line main line and modernised stations with atleast 2 platforms each and reinstating some of the now defunct yards in places like Albury and Wagga etc.

This is my personal idea to make it fun to run and control but the start is to have the merge as much as possible as made and made available to any that want it in one hit and to enjoy the work done by all those that got this started.

Thanks again and let the east coast trains roll.

This would be a more updated list of this merge:
Starting at Seymour VIC
ARTC v2 (Grazlash), This goes from Seymour to Junee

Bethungra Spiral (Tomtre), This goes from Junee, through Bethungra to Cootamundra

WeddinNSW V5.1 (FootplatePhil), This goes from Cootamundra to Galong

Joppa Junction to Binalong (PGibbons), this goes from Galong to Joppa Junction

Goulburn Crookwell Taralga revised (ntesdorf), this goes through Goulburn

Picton to Goulburn (PGibbons), this goes from Goulburn to Picton, if you want to add Grazlash's Illawarra line you need to trim some baseboards at Moss Vale and merge the route there

Also a side note, make sure your route layers are all merged into one. some of these routes have a separately named route layer which makes things more annoying when your trying to place down something to run

Further to Rohcool323's post:
A shot of the northern trim point on the Illawarra South Coast route, retaining the Berrima cement plant spur.


A shot of the merge point, 7 boards south of the one above

Once the entire route and layers are merged, it will be necessary to create a base session which includes "Driver Speed Rule" which will activate speed limits on the Illawarra section.
cheers
Graeme

Rohcool323 said:

This would be a more updated list of this merge:

:
:
Also a side note, make sure your route layers are all merged into one. some of these routes have a separately named route layer which makes things more annoying when your trying to place down something to run

Click to expand...

Sorry to be annoying!

Those 'separately named' route layers have unique names deliberately, in order to make the actual merge easier (Trainz won't do the merge if two layers have the same name).

Thats true to an extent Phil. I had to merge all of the route layers into a single layer to overcome not being able to move a placed train. I found it was quicker to merge the layers when doing the merge, as it takes several minutes to merge them after the route is merged. I first found this to be the case after the last TRS22 update. I also found a couple of places where I could not even place a train, one I remember was around Exeter.
On a happier note I'll be a couple of kilos lighter and cancer free on July 31 when I have my right kidney removed!!!