Junction City is taking shape on the BC&SJ

I've been hard at work on the BC&SJ (Bear Creek & South Jackson) virtual edition.
The Junction City area is getting close to being finished up. So I thought I would share some screen shots with y'all...

First a map of the BCSJ route with the Junction City area hilighted.


The BC&SJ is a fictional route crossing the Oregon Cascades in the early 1950s... (mostly)
Trains start at the flat lands end of things in Salem then progress though flat terrain, some hilly areas and after passing Bear Creek head up into the mountains.

Junction City is located next to (railroad west of) Bear Creek. Most towns on the BC&SJ are aggie centric. Junction City is more industrial with a number of factories.

Here's the west end of town


And another aerial view from the West end of town...


Here's an aerial view taken from the East end of Junction City...




A birdie with a camera took this downward view of central part of town...


There is a bridge carrying road traffic over the tracks because of the high train volume moving through town.


I was watching some of Approach Medium's YouTube videos (especially the Esopagus & Dry Brook series to get ideas (as I'm still rather new to TRAINZ). He was experimenting with painting the ground with asphalt textures then adding sidewalks and lane markings (etc) to them. I've been experimenting with this technique in Browning and now Junction City. It really helps with the texturing if the tracks and streets are laid out on the grid axis. That wasn't the case here in Junction City so I rotated a grid to be more aligned to the tracks (I couldn't get it perfect - I can't figure out how to rotate textures with finer control...). Doing streets that way is a lot of work, but they come out really well (at least I think so).

These scenes are all TRS19.

More screen shots in the next post...
HF

Junction City on the BC&SJ (part 2)

Lets continue with more screen shots (I'm a menace with a camera - don't know when to stop shooting - and that seems to have carried over to TRAINZ screenshots).


Let's get down to earth (lol) with an SP GP9 shoving cars around on the Junction City street trackage...



Another angle (but not a ground level shot...) of the same scene.


If you look carefully you might notice on of the problems I encountered when painting the stripes and markings on the asphalt textured streets - the RR Xing and STOP lettering doesn't nestle right down to the ground and I had to micro-manage it's height. I managed to miss a few which are visible here. I suspect that if I set the ground elevation a skosh lower maybe all that micro adjusting wouldn't have been needed.

The Black Widow'ed GP9 is banging cars at the local elevator... The TurfFX made it easy to model overgrown trackage here.


And looking at the GP9 from the other end while it manipulates the elevator tracks.


I guess I liked this scene. Here's a third view of it...

Hey! That's not '50s freight car they're shoving into position! If you look carefully the elevator dog is yelling something at the train.

Here's a view of the main drag through town taken from the western end.



That's it for this installment. More screenshots follow in part 3.

Cheers,
H.Fithers

Junction City on the BC&SJ (part 3)

Part three of the Junction City screen shots...

There's a little hill outside the west end of town where the rich twits live.


Looking north toward the bridge that carries road traffic over the BC&SJ's tracks.


A warehouse as the east end of town...


A view of the overpass looking roughly north west...


And a beauty shot of the GS-8 class steamers (from K&L) sitting in town for a while...


And we'll finish with a shot of the GN empire building taken from the overpass...


There's still some more to do. The area needs more people - it looks half deserted. I need to lay some invisible roads under the asphalt textures to get traffic to move around. And some more.

But there is a LOT of other areas on the railroad with hardly any detailing.

I hope you liked this tour of Junction City. I had a blast building it and doing screen shots.

Cheers,
H.Fithers

Great looking Layout there!!!!

:wave: Good Evening Horace,

Happened to see your Thread this evening:

My initial thoughts after seeing all the pictures here, you keep following Approach Medium's Work etc, he is a very talented Teacher/illustrater of Technical talent when it comes to building his Routes........Have watched several of his Videos over the year.

Your route looks spectacular.....You didn't mention, but I was wondering if you plan on listing this one in the DSL?

And I agree about lining up the Grids with Tracks, one of the reasons, and you probably found this out, when you lay Ballast or any other Texture for your Track right of way, it looks smoother when the Track and Grid Lines are parallel, of course when Curves come into play, that will not happen, then Trees or Grass, or something can be used too cover up those zigzag texture lines showing, the more obscured, the better.

Thanks for sharing with us........:wave:

Looks excellent and look forward to seeing more progress.

It's always time consuming populating a town or city.

Horacefithers,
Those are some really great shots. Your route looks very promising. I have the same problem with cameras and screenshots. I just want to keep getting shot after shot. That was a problem when you only had 30 exposures to a 35mm camera, but now with digital cameras...storage is the only limiting factor, haha.

I especially liked your ground level shots and the downtown ones. Very nicely done! They show off your attention to detail.

Will your route be seasonal, so you can run trains during the...dare I say it...rainy season, which is essentially September through May? :hehe:

Please keep those screen shots coming. I figured you'd be taking shots from the overpass. You need to put a person on the bridge with a camera. It's the perfect spot for watching the trains.

Heinrich505

Really nice looking route so far. I will continue to follow this thread and see what happens. Would more modern rolling stock look out of place on this route?

very nice work, well done !

Thank you all for your kind remarks!

For some screen shots of the rest of the route check out page 2 of Building a Mountain Railroad.

I'm working on several projects at the moment.
o Pushing the tracks up to the summit in the mountains (track and rudimentary TerraForming [tm] complete)
o Detailing the route between Junction City and Bear Creek (yard)
o Bear Creek yard

I'll post more screen shots when they are more finished.

Cheers,
H.Fithers

More BC&SJ screen shots. in a new thread

[h=1]I started another page to consolidate my BCSJ screenshots (and other related posts)
The thread is:

Bear Creek & South Jackson - progress reports - Building a Mountain Railroad (1080p)[/h]
Cheers,
H.Fithers