Jacob. I'll have to take a look. I sort of fall into your category. I get as much pleasure from the design and build as running. part of me is thinking about a 80/20 switching/running type route. years ago there was a route in MSTS, I THINK that was an urban port district route. tons of detailed buildings and switching. Can't for the life of me remember the name now. I used to have a lot of fun with that one. I love maintenance yards. I thought about doing the Juniata works in PA one time. I still have my eye on doing the Ford River Rouge plant in Detroit. Over a 100 miles of track in an industrial complex! I have yet to get hold of a good diagram showing the track layout. Sadly most of it is gone now. When I was in Lowell this weekend I was looking at all the abandoned track in the area around and in the mills. There were a lot of narrow alleys with old track still in them. and the mills all had track inside that is not on any map I have seen. Sadly I have other hobbies that compete with time during the summer. I have my motorcycle that I use to get out to do photography on. Mostly old mills and lighthouses. But come winter here in New England the bike is put to bed and the photo ops are pretty limited. I retire next summer so... Time for TRAINZ AGAIN!
You might want to invest in TransDEM at some point. This allows you to place topo maps on top of DEM data and then export to a Trainz route ready for importing and working on. You can go as far as placing tracks in place that are ready for adjusting, though I don't like doing that and would rather have a topo map that I can place my own track.
There's another Trainzer Steamboateng that is working off and on on a big Hoosac Tunnel route. We traveled out to North Adams for pictures and talked to locals, and he's now making the route for a local museum out there. What's interesting is he took a 1943/44 topographic map available from the National Geodetic Society and was able to place it accurately on top of current DEM data also available from the National Server. Way Cool!
What's even cooler is you can place the track directly on top of the USGS track lines and they match up accurately. Placing a few spline points and the track will follow the curves exactly. The DEM height is pretty close too - within the resolution of our baseboard in most places if that, depending upon the resolution of the original data you use. I found one area on his North Adams map to be only 3 meters off from what I measured from Google Earth Application in the same location.
The program is available from here:
http://www.rolandziegler.de/StreckeUndLandschaft/startseiteEngl.htm
The price is about $35 USD and is well worth it.
Be warned: There's a bit of steep learning curve, but you'll end up using a portion of the tools in the package so it's not as bad as it looks. This program is also extremely addicting too and you'll find your self creating lots and lots of routes you never thought of. With Trainz you can take these and place tracks that have been ripped up long ago such as all those little branch lines that are missing now, or even better put in tracks that never existed but could have, and this is really, really fun but challenging as well. And last but not least, you can actually adjust the height of routes that are in T:ANE SP1 and below format. This is great for merging disparate areas into a much larger route.
Anyway it is sad what's left today out of all that track that was once active. Imagine what this was like in the heydays even up into the early 1960s when the mills were still active. This was true in Lawrence as well with the mills along the two canals. I remember seeing switchers pushing boxcars along North Canal and even down the middle of Canal Street. I've been trying to replicate this in Trainz as well with mixed results.
