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i am fully aware of that , for some reason TANE is adding a second car that i have not added , since it was late at night when i took these shots ,i could not be bothered to go back and delete it. anyway i can do without the nitpicking. i future i wont bother to post any more developments .I gladly appreciate this, Dan, but the 0-6-2T locomotive was able to haul only one passenger car up the pass. If another passenger car was added, it would acquire double-heading with the shay.
I got the same flack Dan and my route was fictional. So I retaliated by repainting the combine. Some folks just have to show off what they know without considering that others may know more than they do.
What's your DEM data source? It looks a bit low-res to me. Best resolution available for this part of CO appears to be 1/3 arc sec, 10m, according to the National Map Viewer. And that should show more pronounced features, I'd assume.its oddly unpredictable, most of it is correct to about a meter and other parts are three four or more meters out. here's an example in Baxter pass.
of course,there are going to be variations, where its an issue is that the terrain in google earth indicates a higher grade than the ruling grade. a few places where it would be 12 percent if GE is accurate . problem is the railbed is now a road and of course they may have made parts of it much steeper and also removed trestles and fills in some cases.I have found that a rail line is not a steady 1.75%, from one end to another ... instead it is a series of subtle increasing/decreasing rises and falls, subtle leaps and dips, sometimes 0.00%, then the next +0.10%, the next -0.10%, the next 0.00%, the next +0.10% then the next +0.25% ... etc ...
its also a drag when you set a grade, then make a minor tweak to track and then have to reset it again, also, the gradient toolGradients and Trainz? I have come to the conclusion you are never going to get them 100% correct due to the fact that the earth is round and Trainz is flat, so I use creative license to get the gradients to fit the dem where practical and where not I manually adjust the terrain extremely carefully so it still looks natural which is time consuming but worth the effort. My Ffestiniog Route was done using Microdem and consequently needed a lot of manual alteration! Didn't know of TransDem when I originally started the route in TS2009 back in 2008!
Your route is looking very good to me, ignore the critics!
its a while back,and i did a few versions using the sources recommended, some are no longer working correctly , i could not download the resource, ( and dont ask for the particulars , whatever they were has now disappeared from what passes as my memory ) so had to look for others that might not have had the best information.What's your DEM data source? It looks a bit low-res to me. Best resolution available for this part of CO appears to be 1/3 arc sec, 10m, according to the National Map Viewer. And that should show more pronounced features, I'd assume.
I tried myself last night. I opened the USGS download viewer, picked the 1/3 arc sec DEM and some 1960s 1:24,000 topo maps from the historical map collection. The download viewer is quite easy to use in the current version. And no emails anymore for the links.its a while back,and i did a few versions using the sources recommended, some are no longer working correctly , i could not download the resource, ( and dont ask for the particulars , whatever they were has now disappeared from what passes as my memory ) so had to look for others that might not have had the best information.
I tried myself last night. I opened the USGS download viewer, picked the 1/3 arc sec DEM and some 1960s 1:24,000 topo maps from the historical map collection. The download viewer is quite easy to use in the current version. And no emails anymore for the links.
The railway is gone, even in the 1960s map. So, the road is the main clue for the former right-of-way. Since it's a small road, it's not very prominent on the map. The 1/3 arc sec DEM translates to a 10m grid, nominally. The road, however, does not leave any marks. I think it has to do with the way these DEMs were produced: from 1:24,000 topo maps. Compare the contour lines on the map with the TransDEM ones, about the same level of detail.
I generated terrain and ground textures for Trainz and positioned myself to about the same spot where you took your screenshot above, below summit, looking south. In your screenshot the ground texturing looks quite blurred, so it's hard to tell whether my terrain is more pronounced or the same as yours. In any way it is still significantly below true hi-res you would get from LIDAR DEMs. So, I'm afraid, it's manually shaping of cuttings and fills.
Since USGS publishes all DEM data they have, and USGS is the relevant DEM data source for the US, it's very unlikely that Google Earth has access to any different source. It means, you hardly get more precision from there. In the past they used orbital SRTM, well below USGS NED standards. That may have changed, of course.