Route Building (Model Railway)

Hi,
I am planning on building in T:ANE a virtual version of a model railway I am thinking of building.
My question is what is the simplest way to get the plan I have created to appear in surveyor?
From my past experience of building locomotives I was thinking of creating a vehicle or object which would consist of a planar large enough to contain my plan then placing it in as close a spot as possible to where I need it to be in surveyor.

Has anyone tried this? Does anyone have such an object ready made that I could use to add my map too please?

Or are there easier ways than this to do it?

As I'm not working from a real map I'm not fussed about inclines etc, just the layout of the track itself.

Thanks,
Gary.

Basemaps A Track Plan Importer for Trainz, it comes with Trainz Model Railroad 2017 but is available to download, it's free, link and info in this thread https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?135264-Basemapz-A-Track-Plan-Importer-for-Trainz

Hello Gary

"Basemapz" is the thing, you are looking for :
http://www.trainzportal.com/product/view/trainz-model-railroad-2017
(down on the page)

Kind regards
Swordfish

PS: Your locomotives are running fine in T:ANE

Hi,
Thanks for the replies.

P.S. Swordfish, great to hear from you. Regarding T:ANE, yes I know I have just finished doing 120+ screenshots in T:ANE for my new website which should be finished in a week or two. It was nice to see all the locos after quite a long time!

When I have created the route map in Basemapz and added it in content manager should it appear in the "Select Route" menu or is it somewhere within surveyor as I can't see it in the list of routes.
I guess I'm doing something wrong.

Well I've been messing around with that program for a few hours and all I come up with is a blurry mess. The resolution of the converted map is terrible so I'll have to try something else. I think my plan will work better tbh.

Basemapz has the limitation that the smallest image it produces is one baseboard, e.g. about a 30ft square. As you are British I expect your model railway will be much smaller than this, since we don't have the huge basements that, according to Model Railroader, seem to abound in the USA. What you could do is create a plane the (scale) size of your layout and overlay the image to produce a scenery item that you can use. This is what I have done in the past. Another option could be to use a program like reshadex64 to scale up the image, which can work quite well.

teddytoot said:

Basemapz has the limitation that the smallest image it produces is one baseboard, e.g. about a 30ft square. As you are British I expect your model railway will be much smaller than this, since we don't have the huge basements that, according to Model Railroader, seem to abound in the USA. What you could do is create a plane the (scale) size of your layout and overlay the image to produce a scenery item that you can use. This is what I have done in the past. Another option could be to use a program like reshadex64 to scale up the image, which can work quite well.

Click to expand...

As you know this also has something to do with the source image. I ran into that problem with a route image I chose from a book. When I brought the image in, it was for one too small, and when scaled up was a blurry blob. I ended up rescaling the image in Irfanview, or Paint.net, I can't remember which now, and then recreating the route again through Basemapz.

The other thing too, I found out is if you take the default size for the track scale, you may end up with unrealistic spacing between the layout bench work. In the above mentioned layout, the default scale settings made the bench work so close together that no human, unless they were a 5 year-old child, could fit in the corridor! Whoever had created the original route drawing was not totally accurate in their scaling, and it appears that much was faked to make the drawing look pretty rather than be a practical working example. The layout would probably work if it was built by hand using plywood and lumber, but didn't exactly work well in TMR2017 or T:ANE without a lot of fiddling around.

Gary,
I have imported Sanborn fire insurance maps into my Everett & Monte Cristo Ry world in order to locate streets and buildings. I create a two-dimensional plainer or three-dimensional box the size of my map (4,000 ft by 4,000 ft). Then paint the surface with my map. Then create a Trainz object. This has worked very well for me. The detail is sharp enough to determine the location of buildings and, I suppose, track. If not, while in the 3-D program, you could create objects on the map that would locate critical locations.

I am creating a small city along the railway with several dozen buildings. I am sure importing a track plan would provide similar results.

Didrik Voss
Everett & Monte Cristo

Hi,
I managed to find what in the end was a simple cure. I opened the tga file within content manager and resized it to 4096 x 4096 and the image in Surveyor was 100% clearer. I did try double that but T:ANE couldn't deal with it and content manager kept shutting down every time I tried to submit changes.

And yes you're right teddytoot, it is a small layout 13 1/2ft x 4 ft approx. but still too big really for where I live. Anyway I managed to build a decent working version in a few hours last night to get an idea of how it would look in the real World and what kind of train lengths it could handle. If I could add screenshots from my PC on here then I would.

If you want to build a virtual model railway as an aid to creating a "real" layout, then obviously you need to create it to that exact size.

My approach is rather different. I prefer to imagine that I have a room about 30' square (for a UK 1:76 scale layout) and then think what I would do with that area if I had unlimited finance as well! I then use a model railway plan for inspiration, but using larger "radius" points/turnouts with the correct Trainz track spacing - ie. 3.5 metre centres (other than for sidings which would often be closer).

I also insist on being able to reach all tracks easily in case of derailments! (Not a problem in Trainz but essential for a model railway simulation if it is to be realistic.)

My approach to using model railway plans is described more fully at https://raystrainz.wordpress.com/plans/

By the way if a room 30' square seems unrealistic, it is about the size of the loft space available in a bungalow I used to own. Unfortunately, it was the finance which was lacking - as well as the time!

Ray

You can upload screenshots from within Tane to the Trainz Gallery by clicking your save screen and then on the pop up that says upload image to gallery. then on post click link http://www.trainzportal.com/mytrainz/view_media_post?media_post_id=37196