Progress on the Uintah RW

After a week working on the numerous creeks feeding into evacuation creek, and sorting out trestles, heights, creek banks, faulty topography and god knows what else further up evacuation creek, I needed a change, so I jumped a few miles up the canyon tor Dragon and did some fixing of the track, the hotel and the environs near all these items. Also removed the old freight house ( which burnt down around 1911 or so ) and replaced it with the smaller version.
There is still much to do at dragon, but at least I have now more or less completed the trackwork to a better standard and fixed a few kinks in the grades near the trestle.

Firstly tho, five miles up the canyon , here's a shot of 0-6-2 no 21 passing Urado.
This was a short 2 car spur that served a budding oil company of the same name . The company was supposed to run a five mile branch line to the oil field, but that never eventuated. I cannot work out where the actual well was located or whether it was a shale oil project , of which more then a few were attempted back in the 20s and 30s, they were not economical then but the area is littered with them now.
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Back at Dragon earlier in the day the daily passenger train is resting , cliffs at the back are a hint of things to come
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So far i have not seen a single track stop block on the Uintah , whether they just didn't bother to use them or not .... they did things their way :)
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Overview of the yard,ticket office to the left, icehouse to the right and behind it the hotel ,which was a pain to construct as it has a series of terraces for its lawns .
The grass of which is much too green, I'll need to reskin if possible as there was so little water around that its grass covering was less than 100%. by this time ( 1930 or so ) it had probably burnt down as after the black dragon mine closed, Dragon went into a slow decline and the hotel was neglected and boarded up .

All of this isn't finished yet, but this is an indication of whats coming when the route is hopefully released.
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West side lumber Shay 12 is now masquerading as Uintah number 5 , its unlikely that the Shays were active in this are at this time as they were so slow , they were usually at Atchee as helpers and for shunting, but one might have been based on this portion of the line. Unfortunately there are no known photos of the tipple at Dragon, we had dimensions, so Ben made it basing it on the tipple at Atchee.
Finally two shots of a new item ,which has been made by GMAN 347 who has made a number of great items for the Rollins Pass route. GMAN kindly offered to step into the breach and make a few items whilst Ben is having treatment ( although he assures me he is still working on an animated gilsonite loader at Pigeon toe spur when he feels up to it ) .
So here's a couple of shots of the new gilsonite hoist and hoist house GMAN has made , this isn't animated but is a very nice piece of work and much appreciated.
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this hoist is well over 100 ft high, gmans also going to try to make a spline for the gilsonite shaft with a ground texture to cover up the shaft hole, if he can do it it will be a weight off my mind as so far i have not been able to do a good job on this aspect of modeling the gilsonite diggings.
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You are certainly accumulating a very nice collection of locomotives. I am looking forward to your next update. :D

The third shot in the last set shows, on the left, how well the vegetation is progressing.
 
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You are certainly accumulating a very nice collection of locomotives. I am looking forward to your next update. :D

The third shot in the last set shows, on the left, how well the vegetation is progressing.

ah, but you haven't seen all the empty bits :)

its getting there , thank goodness for caddylars shrub #1d small, it allows me to fill an area very quickly, the only downside is , I then have to go and manaully drop every single item down below ground level, as unless the terrain is flat, parts of the shrubs are floating in mid air.

As for locos, there may be more coming which are the real McCoy. Someone who is rather a good builder says they are going to make some of the Uintah 2-8-2's and shays, they have the drawings and dimensions. but i'm not counting on it, life has a habit of getting in the way of these things, be nice if even one of these fine machines did eventuate, but i'm not holding my breath :)
 
Now that GMAN has completed the big hoists and loader I decided to get stuck into fleshing out the giant metropolis that is Bonanza :)
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official population nowadays is ONE, but even then, you'd be lucky to assemble 150 full time residents .

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Some folks just find the hustle and bustle of the big gilsonite town too much and flee to other burgs in search of some peace and quiet. In order to do that, they have to catch the morning mixed, calling at sprawling towns such as Watson ,Dragon and all points South .
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early 'kiss and ride" carpark.....
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just a couple of hundred feet away no 51 is getting ready to pull a heavy load of gilsonite to Mack, even this monster could not pull the entire load over Baxter pass,the train would be split in sections at Wendella, as much due to braking concerns as anything else, as descending down 7.5 grades led to a number of runaways and some fatalities.
At Cowboy about 7 miles futher north, shay number 5 is preparing soem more gilsonite loads for the larger freights that are assembled at Bonanza and Little Cowboy
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as usual ,nobody ever seem to clean up after themselves at these mine sites.
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meanwhile in surveyor, i'm playing around with the new gilsonite shaft spline that GMAN has created,so far it looks very promising... this is at Little Cowboy mine
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The biggest issue is the size of the shaft Trainz allows one to make, digholes are not an option as the mesh underneath doesn't run parallel to the direction of the shaft and the topography tool makes a hole that's just a bit too big , had a lot of trouble getting the loader to be high enough due to the hole nearby, but this is a big improvement over what I was using before , so many thanks to GMAN.
 
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Gman is a great collaborator.
I'm glad that Gman helps you make the most of your route that I always find fascinating.

:Y::Y:
 
Gman is a great collaborator.
I'm glad that Gman helps you make the most of your route that I always find fascinating.

:Y::Y:
He's doing a great job on some of the toughest items on the route, Gilsonite mines present a fairly unique type of mining that's not been tackled in trainz as far as I am aware. Very narrow trenches are hard to construct, but the trench spline should do the trick.
 
I like to get a bit of variety as doing the same task day after day is tiring and can be depressing if its very repetitive. So I've shot off to another part of the route near the White river and the stretch from there to Watson, which is around about 8 miles long .

I've bunged in more riverbank splines and begun to recolor the surrounds to blend it in and vegetate on top to disguise any joins . However,I've also done a couple of miles near Bonanza as well, making track final alignments/adjustments and adding some basic vegetation , blending in the surrounds to the creek and making it reasonably realistic .

I intend it try to do this to the whole route in the next few months if my arm holds up and then when completed to that standard, i'll ask for a few beta testers to see if they can point out any really bad track faults or point out bits I've missed . PM me if interested.

Here's a shot outside Bonanza , parts of this line have 5% grades and the gilsonite would have been a heavy load for anything other than this 2-6-6-2.This engine is on the downhill track heading towards White River
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I've been experimenting with merging various cliffs splines to convey the 150 ft high cliffs at the junction of the White river and Evacuation creek , its getting there , but I have to generate more differing textures for each spline as there's some repetition. I imagine chucking in too many may be a strain on some graphics cards but my elderly 2gb gtx 680 seems to be able to play this ok so far on lower settings.
Below : view from across the river of the train coming from Evacuation Creek heading to the White River Bridge and water stop
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still work to do here .
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its impossible to avoid including wide vistas here, the country is so big , if you cut bits out it looks awful, so this part of the route is quite a number of boards wide as the railroad runs alongside the river, then across to Bonanza , the zig zag means I have to include the areas with no track as they are visible as the route climbs up to several summits and back down again .
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:wave: Good Morning Sir dangavel,

Pictures look so natural, especially the one with the Sun in it...........!

:cool: Whats really cool that I notice, Vegetation, Texture all change as you look in different areas, just as you would expect and we know that took quite some time to create, Kudos.

Keep up the fabulous work. :udrool:
 
been working on baxter pass , here's some shots of the latest version
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In the early morning light in 1924 two shays take a mixed up towards the summit on the 7.5% grade
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The usual caveat - this is not yet complete , many more shrubs and trees to place and more cliff splines and numerous rocks further on up the grade .
finally about 30 odd miles north a double header pulls a freight towards Bonanza on the never completed extension on the late lamented Ben Dorsey's modified Georgetown loop bridge
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as a rest from Baxter pass I transported myself off to dragon and completed vegetating along the creek in the very arid stretch from dragon to dragon junction . here we see a shay and a wrok crew repairing a section of creek near Temple which was washed out by a flashflood.
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they used cribbing to fill in washed out sections( a constant problem on this road as shale was frequent along much of the route )
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i am putting in significant rock formations close to the track, but as it will take years to complete this i'm concentrating on getting the immediate environs next to the track completed to drive-able standard so hopefully i can get a version out for people to drive in a few months. about 24 miles to go of main line and 10 more of the branches up to rainbow etc.
 
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Having discovered that i can tweak color settings to prevent light textures form 'blooming ' I've gone back and changed the soil color to be what it always should have been in the first place, thus making the whole thing look more realistic, lot of work though , I've roughly done about 30 miles in the new color scheme and am quite pleased.
This section is almost complete, but i still have to put in more shrubs in the distance.
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one mile out of Mack number 11 crosses bridge 01 slowly due to speed restrictions
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view towards Mack and DRGW mainline to Ogden in distance

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also been adding fields, as this area was irrigated, but will leave the drainage ditches to another time much later down the track ( if ever )

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now back to doing the rest of it and listening to one of prince's live shows on youtube .RIP prince !
 
I really like your color changes Dan.

It looks better doesn't it ? my biggest issue has been color right from the start, i have images of the area but the soil was so light ,that with the trainz standard color settings used, any original colors just got overexposed at noon, yellows beiges and whites just looked awful , thus a darker overall tone was chosen. its only when i found out that you can turn off the post processor settings that i found I could use lighter colors. its annoying the correct settings cannot be saved but hopefully that will be rectified in the new release.
meanwhile today i have spent more time on the DRGW std gauge line and here's a Berkshire taking a freight past the outskirts of Mack, entering Ruby canyon.
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still more work to be done on the bank and the creek opposite. i have a few images taken by Otto Perry on this curve, but i cannot find them as I have soooo many shots , they are no doubt buried in the bowels of my computer somewhere, probably named by number not letters , thus hard to find. i need them to check what i looked like in the 1930s. serves me right for not renaming them when i saved them .
this section of the line has one of the largest vistas, it much quicker to do the section near mp 17 which enters a narrow canyon, but that still leaves 17 miles of a very wide viewpoint that takes ages to vegetate and color. .
if i deleted boards, the view would not be like the prototype , I've tired but it means that you don't see the distant hills and it doesn't look as good. the irony is, even with 15.000 meter draw distance some of the distant shrubs are not visible :-( on the far left a lot have just disappeared ........
 
meanwhile back at Baxter Pass a pair of Shays are straining to pull a freight up the 5% grade on the north side of the pass, between Windy Point and the Summit. Weight had to be distributed carefully as going downhill on the 7.5% was a dangerous enterprise at the best of times
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This is a work in progress edition to let people see the north side of the pass a bit more. its nearly all 5% grade. still a lot of vegetating and earth cliff bank creation to do on this side of Baxter pass, but getting there slowly
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Train leaving Mcandews on a heavy freight , in reality the two Shays might have just have managed 500 tons up the 5% to the summit. I've seen images of them pulling six gilsonite cars and a boxcar , but not a combine as well.Vegetation needs to be added above the curve as well as all around the track as well as more rocks.
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reverse angle view including the lake, there are a few cabins and corrals to add, in the late teens, there was a sawmill here, those who would like to make an earlier version of the route could include one on the flat ground on the left before the lake . the projected tunnel would have been here, the track would have continued in a straight line instead of climbing and curving to the right .

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Theres only one cutting on the climb to the summit, but a number of high cuts into the mountainside make things interesting to model , here , vegetation is low as its exposed to north winds.

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there one deep cut into the cliff past the hairpin , i think i've identified the correct location from a photo, the road follows the old track but they have widened it a bit so some features have changed, video of the road online is a help, but there are still a few gaps in my knowledge as to just where cuts were made.
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as the train nears the balloon loop at Columbine, there are increasing numbers of Aspens , the foreground will contain scrub oaks and junipers.
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Columbine was a popular picnic area and a place that helpers could couple up to or pass other trains. the cabin was used seasonally for cattle grazing.
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approaching the water tank, created by the late Ben Dorsey, there's an issue that I overlooked when the tank was created inasmuch as its attached track is level but the grade is 5% , thus the hump . unfortunately Ben's no longer here to fix this so I'll have to drop it lower and put track over the top of it which will no doubt stop it being interactive :-(
in earlier days there was also logging here.
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from here opposite Columbine you can see how the route winds its way up the hillside towards the summit. still lots of work to do on this section before its completed. just above Columbine to the right is the sole cutting on the climb up the valley, but I am still unsure if this is the spot it was located, there is only one close up image and Polley in his book says it was situated on the curve overlooking columbine. however i have looked on video, in old images and on google earth and I cannot find anywhere that fits the bill. at the moment it will have to do.

I'll post a few more close up columbine shots in the narrow gauge screenshot section .
 
approaching the water tank, created by the late Ben Dorsey, there's an issue that I overlooked when the tank was created inasmuch as its attached track is level but the grade is 5% , thus the hump . unfortunately Ben's no longer here to fix this so I'll have to drop it lower and put track over the top of it which will no doubt stop it being interactive :-(

Inserting

rotate-yz-range -5,5
rollstep 0.1

into the config.txt may fix that depending on which way Ben did the y axis. Your tank may lean a bit but should still be interactive. :D
 
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