Routes to run New Haven Equipment.

Hello,

Many of you are aware PWeiser has released tons of excellent equipment for the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. I'm wondering, what are some good routes on the DLS that suit 1920s - 1950s New Haven engines and rolling stock and maybe other New England railroads?

You know about NEC, there are about a dozen versions that are all about the same. It might be possible to backdate that route (or one of them anyway) and rename the cities. There are several other NEC segmented routes, some quite old that I've looked at but most look like they'd take a lot of work to convert to NH and an earlier era. I took an early version of msgsapper's New England Coastal route and electrified 14 miles of that and that's where I take pictures of Paul's stuff. I can't share that route though.

gfisher did a route called <kuid:106916:102735> VT-NH Loop that has a lot of possibilities but is incomplete, I've considered trying to revamp it but haven't found the time. George did another route <kuid:106916:1059> Bridgeport Southern that is a one board NH route, I have not looked at electrifying it. George's <kuid:106916:100041> Mad River Railroad is a Vermont route and forms the backbone of msgsapper's New England Coastal route and might be a good candidate for electrification. Merging all of George's stuff above might work well too if you are willing to spend the time.

There are several New Haven routes on the DLS but all are incomplete at best. That is all I've got. Good hunting.

Edit: <kuid:564270:100143> New Haven and New York to Boston by hanker450 deserves honorable mention. I'm not sure but it appears to be a DEM based map of the whole distance from Watertown to Boston. Very much incomplete and only a single baseboard wide but somewhere well over 100 miles of track. No electrification, no ballast for that matter, most towns are marked but I am not sure how close the track is to correct. Everything is on the DLS except some rolling stock that can be ignored.

I understand that the New England Coastal route you modded was named NH Coastal. It must be impossible to track down GFisher for permission, as MSGSapper merged most of his smaller maps. I prefer longer maps rather than single base board layouts. Mad River looks like a TRS2004 era route that is long but not very demanding as it appears to use older assets. What type of catenaries should I use?

shebashetan7 said:

I understand that the New England Coastal route you modded was named NH Coastal. It must be impossible to track down GFisher for permission, as MSGSapper merged most of his smaller maps. I prefer longer maps rather than single base board layouts. Mad River looks like a TRS2004 era route that is long but not very demanding as it appears to use older assets. What type of catenaries should I use?

Click to expand...

George drops around from time to time.

I used gfisher's

<kuid:106916:10364> DL&W Cat 1t Single Pole
<kuid:106916:10366> DL&W Cat 1t Single Pole Wood
<kuid:106916:10360> DL&W Cat Wire Only

I also used pweiser's NH semaphore signals with seniorchief's dwarf NH semaphores.

South end of Mad River segment of my New Haven Coastal route



I replaced the container industry with a scratch built TOT industry that sort of works



North end of the Mad River segment



I also removed all freeways.

Have fun!

I'm going to mod the Mad River Line by gfisher.

I replaced the roads and groups of trees with versions that are not "chronically transparent" to the point they distract from the layout. The individual trees were swapped with mcguirel's speedtrees of similar size and redid the lighting and shaders.

This thread caught my eye. I've been looking for something to run Pweiser's great NH equipment on too, but just couldn't bring myself to run them on the Wilmington to Philly NEC. Too much competition with the Pennsy GG1s, haha. Like Norm, I was running them on the NE Coastal, but I'd only just started trying to electrify. My skills at route building have a long way to go as I'm still learning the system.

I saw that Philskene did a route, <kuid:69871:5502> Mad River Railroad Extended 1a, and it has Mad River as well as at least one other route merged; I recognized the locations on it. I'm looking at it now, but I'd have to do a lot of tree planting, as Phil mainly added some industries but left the tree scenicking to others.

Any suggestions for trees, seasonal or otherwise, would be welcome.

Heinrich505

More progress on the Mad River Line in TRS2019. I replaced all the grouped tree assets with ones that were not transparent, and most of the grass textures. The water has been changed too. All the individual trees were replaced with speedtrees of similar size. Next step is to electrify it.

Shebashetan7,
Man, that is quick work and it really looks nice.

Heinrich505

Thank you. Chances are I'll change out the stations and rename them. NH never operated on Vermont, the original setting of this route, but it stands in very well for Massachusetts or Connecticut.

Great looking Pictures shebshetan7

shebashetan7 said:

More progress on the Mad River Line in TRS2019. I replaced all the grouped tree assets with ones that were not transparent, and most of the grass textures. The water has been changed too. All the individual trees were replaced with speed trees of similar size. Next step is to electrify it.

Click to expand...

Nice looking Route you have there, very tranquil looking with the water color you selected.......

I have lots of Routes with Transparency issues, not only with Trees, but with some Semaphores Signals, Bumpers, and other Assets, including some Bridges that part show transparent, and in some cases like Tehachapi Loop Route on Mojave Sub completely transparent...I suppose it something to due Alpha Channel?

Anyway, its above my pay grade for now, I don't know if their fixable, I have heard on some, it is Mesh that needs redoing, and if you don't have original one, your out of luck.....

Great looking Pictures shebshetan7, thank you for sharing your improvements with us..........:wave:

blueodessey said:

Nice looking Route you have there, very tranquil looking with the water color you selected.......

I have lots of Routes with Transparency issues, not only with Trees, but with some Semaphores Signals, Bumpers, and other Assets, including some Bridges that part show transparent, and in some cases like Tehachapi Loop Route on Mojave Sub completely transparent...I suppose it something to due Alpha Channel?

Anyway, its above my pay grade for now, I don't know if their fixable, I have heard on some, it is Mesh that needs redoing, and if you don't have original one, your out of luck.....

Great looking Pictures shebshetan7, thank you for sharing your improvements with us..........:wave:

Click to expand...

That's scenic New England for ya! No wonder why the railroad was called New Haven.

Both Pweiser and Gfisher made NH style catenary which would be better suited for the New Haven due to its unique appearance.

I have modified the Madd River route in the past. That wye that leads off to the lumber operations presents a problem for through trains. For some reason, at least in the past, the AI used to do a dance around the wye instead of going straight through as they are supposed to do. I ended up putting three track marks for each leg. One at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end as if to guide the AI through the switches.

Speaking of the lumber operations... I removed that and turned the area into a resort and ski town by clearing and smoothing the hills and putting in some ski lifts as well as a hotel complex, houses, and a small town like area with a station and a small engine house.

Due to the single track nature of the route, I ended up putting in some double track stretches here and there. Being the New Haven as you want it to be, you may want to consider more double track since the New Haven used a lot of double-, tripe-, and quadruple-track all over its routes. They tended to single track mostly smaller branches and freight leads, but mainlines were double and wider.

That wouldn't be much of a problem, as the Mad River line has a short main line that is long enough for a scenic ride through the New England Countryside. No branchlines otherwise they're rather short. Shouldn't take much work to double track the line.

Yeah the main is pretty short, which also makes it great for merging into other things as well.

For the New Haven Catenary, check Trainz Pro Routes. If you haven't already, you need to sign-up, and your username needs to be the same as the one you use here.

Paul also has a lot more nice equipment there too which will work well on the route.

In addition, I managed to repair K&L's NH 2-8-0 to run in TRS19.

The new Mad River Line:

Should I get rid of the power lines that run along the sections of double track with the catenaries of the design seen in the second screenshot?

I like it. The catenary lines really look like they belong there.

They sure do. I did some small tweaks to the yard in the town with the habor. Some of the catenaries in the yard have been changed to their wooden versions as seen in this screenshot, for one they add some variety to the scene and plus the catenaries with steel mounts have wires that go into the ground that come into contact with tracks built close by to them. The wood ones don't have that wire, so I resolved to use steel catenary mounts on outer tracks and wooden mounts on inner tracks, or branchlines.