I have got seriously stuck into the 'fake ' railway , the stretch between Watson and White river , which was projected but never constructed due to a recession in 1921. This is the stretch near white river mp 67-68 and no doubt my "friend" Josh will complain about me using a non standard URY engine.
this section was where the terrain had to be extensively remodeled as the DEM was not precise enough to show undulations in the terrain .
there are several issues with trying to make this section, the biggest one being, its SO remote, there are no roads near most of the canyon, and even where there is one crossing the canyon, there are no color photos to give an idea of the rocks, i have a few frames from a speeded up video taken from youtube where the bridge crosses the canyon, but its fuzzy and not much help.
So i have to used google earth, but that doesn't give a good idea of the rock and vegetation colors , normally one can find a few images taken by hikers, but nobody seems to go there ever, its most frustrating .
I imagine that eventually I will have to replace the rocks I've used as I expect I'll find out these are the wrong colors, what i have used are from further down the canyon , near dragon, with some color changes as i think its greyer rock in this area .
not completed but much more sparse vegetation here ,it gets VERY dry in this area , so it will be easier to apply veg and complete the deed, thousands of sage but not as many as near American thank goodness , as it can be a tedious job placing each one. .
overall tho, i'm glad i made this section as it gave the late Ben Dorsey an opportunity to make lots of lovely bridges that were a lot more sophisticated that the majority of real Uintah spans.These were some of the last he ever made and he had a ball doing them . However if anyone thinks they are too out of place with the overall Uintah ethos then it would be possible to substitute them with standard trestle splines . My scenario in my alternative universe is that prices remained high and this allowed the significant investment in building the extension , instead of closing in 1939 WW11 boosted the local economy, leading to a boom in gilsonite demand and prices , in addition oil shale exploration in the area happened years before it actually took off. These alternative universes are very handy, now all i need is one where trainz works perfectly and has better terrain tools
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unlike a model, you cant really trim down the boards here as it would look awful, but it does mean a lot of extra texturing on distant mountains.
in this shot for instance, its not an option to remove the far distant hills as they are part of the white river and the railroad runs alongside that for a mile or so.