Merging Route Issues ( I messed it up) Forgot Rule number #1
Good Saturday Morning all,
Another week passed by quickly as our weather is slowly turning over Fall cooler days and I welcome it after a slew of 100 degree plus days and 70-80 degree evenings.......
Now I have a little story to talk about, that I think might interest a few of you?
I'm sure your curious now, about my Rule #1, and this one is an important one, as you'll soon find out? Do not have any Consists or single rail cars on either Route to merge!!! Make sure you delete all of them from Routes to Merge!!
So I have a couple of Breweries on Wilson&Olive Fairmount/Kelly Shortline MP Route/Fairview E/W project, after finishing my Beer Plants and stuffing some random Boxcars at the their Docking spots, I got the idea, I need to find some Beer Boxcars specially designed for Transport of Said Product and keeping it in the same condition as when it left the Factory, that means Temperature Controlled Climate from Brewer to Customer, IE the stores you buy your Cool or very Cold Beers at.....
So I went on the DLS and looked/shopped for everything under the keyword Beer, and what do you know, there are 2 different Routes called "beer Line & Beerline" one is Capitalized and one is not! So I downloaded them, and decided I would like to Merge "beer line" for now, the is one is Model RR style, which I will check out later.......
That was 3 days ago, so each day after merging, I would make new Track connections, Mountains, some more connective tiles, etc. The Route comes with about 17 Tiles and is rough unfinished, which works for my Customization wants.....Now about 12 revisions later after lots of rebuild, cutting in new mainlines to Beer Line Route, I goto use a Quick Drive and also attempt to use default Session, to my horror, it takes 3 mins to load, and all Tracks, signals and basically a white screen, I can't run either Session. Houston we got us a real problem here....Sessions and Quick Drive load in 15-30 Secs on my computer, not 3 mins or more, I knew something serious was afoot!!!
Ironically, I can close either Quick Drive or Default Session, and or Save or Create New Sessions Etc, but if I try to use them, same thing occurs. And I can open the Route for Editing, and everything shows normal, I can even Edit in Surveyor no Problem, but try to run Quick Drive or Default Session, nope I get the missing layer issue....So I go thru all my backup files, and to my dismay, same issue, you see, all I did was build things, I never tried to run a session or Quick drive after the Merge, Stupid me, Idiot!!!!!
Thinking back, I made another bad mistake, not thinking about proper merging techniques, I have a ton of Cars and Trains on the premerge Route, I know better, when merging, that all trains have to be removed off of both Routes, before merging, there are merges that you might get away with in Trainz with a few consists, but I probably have 30 trains(consists and over a 100 cars easy on the Route......In other words, I probably shot myself in the foot on this one....
Fortunately I kept the last few copies of my Route premerge on Beer Line, and Driver mode works perfectly with those copies.....
Now if only both of my feet would bend backwards, I would give myself a fast boot in the pants for stupidity. I have to say, after losing 3 days of work, I think I won't forget to remove trains and all consists after this kerfuffle.....LOL !!!!!
I know better, let my lesson be a good warning for the new folks coming to Trainz........
The bright side of it, I took a ton of Pictures showing my Work and the changes I made, so I will use the pictures and my memory to reconstruct a new merge and do it over again...........I chalk this up to good experience teacher........
Tonight will see what I saw and how parts of this merge looked......
Alright so when you go from Surveyor into Quick Drive or you go from the Menu to Quick Drive or Session, this is what it should look like in TRS-19, some part of the Route showing OK here, and you start your Session......
Now same idea, but when you get a Screen like this one, long time to come up, well, I think this picture says it all.......Got my driver, that's good, but we are in the Stratosphere, not on the land.....We have some type of Corruption with the Route, or missing Layer.....It doesn't really matter at this point, with the Saved Route I just opened here along with 12 other Saved Files, it opened like this,,either in Quick Drive or Session using Driver Mode to play with Route.
Here is picture of the Beer Line.....Very cool switching setup for me to play with...... I will re do the merge with this one.
Map Picture of where I merged it in with Wilson and Olive Route, would work perfectly as Branch Line headed North West in Wilson Route. When I do the merge again, I plan on adding 2 layers of spacing Tiles do to some issues where it meets the Wilson Route.........I don't care for one of the views I get of the other Route, so I need to space the Beer line further South and then it will look more the way I want it too come out. Just me being a little picky.......
And the finished Map with the Merge 3 days ago. Now I turned the who Route 90 Degrees on it's side, so North is on Right edge of Picture, not the top, for more clarity to see how it looks..You can see the other Merges I did up to the Right side of the Route.
This is the left rough side of the merge, we have about 25 foot drop, no big deal, as it ends up about 1-2% Grade easy enough to set the tracks. I allowed for one tile of expansion on the side of Merge. This is why I want too add 2 spacer tiles, I need the transition of height to be further away, so it is not quite so abrupt here distance wise.
Looking North West from Merge connection, here is Rough Switching area, very nicely laid out, Author says it is still WIP........You can see the bottom Lake area, and Power Plant which is edge of Wilson Olive Route. On this view, I plan on extending the water area below the Power Plant area on upper right quadrant of this picture....Hope that makes sense........You'll see the difference later on in a few weeks when I catch up to those pictures......
These are some of the Consists Author had setup, I haven't used these type Switchers, I didn't get a chance to see how they do, But they look very Cool......Lots of Boxcars here too......
Alright here is the initial Rough Cut to get from Zero O Elevation to upper part of Olive Line.......Everything needs to be blended in here......Which I did, do, now I will have to remake it..And I did a really nice job with it too......LOL
"The Milwaukee Road's beer line" use this for search in Google Etc, there is now a Bike to Rail Path setup where this line used to be.......I'm not a Beer Drinker, so I never knew anything about this lines existence...Pretty amazing about how it was created and what they used to do.....Word has it, that Micro Breweries put them out of business along with other Economic issues.
"Milwaukee Road Historical Association"
https://www.mpl.org/archives/milwaukee_road_archives.php
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago,_Milwaukee,_St._Paul_and_Pacific_Railroad
OK folks, I'm over my outburst here, time pull my boot straps up, forget it and get ready to do it again, only this time, I'll check the Driver Functions after the merge... I have to think something is different with TRS-19 over TS-12, I never ran across this after a merge.....Either it worked or didn't in TS-12, and you knew right away, because the Program would crash and you'd have to figure out why you couldn't merge your Routes for a variety of reasons, mostly for me, it was too large for the Graphics and System Ram, which is not an issue any longer for me with my Newer Laptop, that I have maxed out Memory, Converted from Rotating Drives to SSD's etc. So there's that? Something more learned how things work differently in TRS-19.....
Night all, and have a blessed Sunday.......