Modeling an historic American streetcar layout

For the last few weeks I've been gathering resources on a little electric street railway operation that I'd like to try my hand at modeling and I have a few questions for the community...

1) Is this still worth pursuing in TS12 or should I bite the bullet and upgrade? That's going to require a bit of an investment in my hardware, but if I'm truly better off in terms of the available content and the active user base, I would seriously consider T:ANE or TRS2019. I've always been something of a Trainz Luddite.

2) Streetcars/trams seem to be sort of a niche interest in the American Trainz community, but I know there is a fair amount of historic European tram content available, and I suspect that some of it (e.g. cobblestone tracks, wooden wire supports, etc.) could likely pass for the American equivalent. Are there any European tram fans who could perhaps weigh in and point me in the direction of content creators/third-party sites to keep an eye out for?

3) There seems to be a good amount of period-appropriate scenery content available, but the one area that appears to be lacking is 1930s-1940s vehicles. I have found some nice trucks on the DLS, but in terms of personal automobiles there seems to be a gap between 1900s-1920s and 1950s-1960s content. Is there anything hiding on third party sites that I may not be aware of? The line I'm modeling was bustituted in 1947, but if need be I could always fudge it and create a hypothetical 1950s version with the available content.

Thank you.

Blutorse4792 said:

Is this still worth pursuing in TS12 or should I bite the bullet and upgrade? That's going to require a bit of an investment in my hardware

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In my experience, TANE runs better than TS12 on the same hardware I got to run TS12. So it might not require you to invest in new hardware. Can't speak for TRS19.
I do know TS12 is out of support already and TANE also officially is no longer supported yet should get 1 more SP before they close that chapter.

oknotsen said:

In my experience, TANE runs better than TS12 on the same hardware I got to run TS12. So it might not require you to invest in new hardware. Can't speak for TRS19.
I do know TS12 is out of support already and TANE also officially is no longer supported yet should get 1 more SP before they close that chapter.

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If I were to acquire TRS19 down the line, I'd still probably acquire T:ANE for legacy content (as I did with 2010), so I think I may just go ahead and take the baby step now while TRS19 has some time to mature.
Is T:ANE known to be generally less buggy than TS12 was? I've also already generated my DEM terrain for this layout in TS12, are there any known issues with upgrading layouts into T:ANE?

I work with a couple of route creators and their view is tending towards TS19 to avoid hassles in taking a route from one version to another. Having said that TS12 is still being used. The issues are to do with things like speedtrees and tufx. Most scenery objects are TS12 so no major problems there.

Realistically you want a GTX 1050 TI or GTX 1650 as a minimum and that might run in your present computer. https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php ideally you're after a score of 8,000 or more. Typically cars are high poly for some reason so a liquid nitrogen cooled RTX 2080 TI might be best. An RTX 2070 seems to work fairly well.

Cheerio John

A quick check of the DLS shows about 5600 items versioned for T:ANE SP2 and later. That's around 1% of the total content on the DLS. Only about half of these are TRS19 specific, meaning you only have to worry about compatibility of half of 1% of all the content available. So, it's probably MUCH safer and better to stick with TS12.

Also, you can simply backdate most of the newer content except the tiny amount of PBR stuff out there and, as always, routes/sessions. Fixing errors in older content for newer versions is usually much more involved, albeit usually doable if you know how.

When I transitioned between TS12 and T:ANE, I imported close to 200K assets. Out of that 200K, 7,500 needed repairs at the time when there were no updates or repaired content available for download. Out of the 7,500 assets, 2.5K were deleted and then the actual repair process took place. Out of the remaining assets, I ended up deleting 99% of them anyway because they hadn't been used in a decade or more and then I kept the balance. The repairs were simple being mostly config.txt errors and missing textures. The usual stuff that for some reason TS12 ignored. There was a bunch of assets that could not be fixed that had some script errors and mesh errors. These were beyond what I could fix and those assets were ditched. There was also a bunch that had some fake LOD targets. The content creator(s) had taken the first mesh and replicated that for each of the LOD targets so that there was no transition. This caused errors with these assets, and these too were ditched.

Then I moved everything I had to TRS19... 99% of the assets moved over. Since the early T:ANE days, a lot has happened. First of all I have zero patience for repairing content and will delete stuff so hanging on to the old stuff is not an issue for me unless it's still in use. Secondly the community has repaired a ton of assets and I've replaced what was repaired before with updated assets and threw more stuff away.

So my recommendation is move forward, but leave the old stuff behind if you don't need it. Take in the routes first. Download missing dependencies, import anything not downloadable, and then check for updates. The two biggest issues you will run into will be Speed Trees and N3V Built-in/DLC assets. Older Speed Trees are not compatible with the latest Speed Tree program data. This is thanks to IDV, the company that wrote the Speed Tree code. To get around the bad trees in T:ANE and up, replace the trees with other non-Speed Trees, such as CL Trees by Clam1952, or with RMM's Speed Trees. rmm_st_<some tree_name). RMM created some TS12 trees that will obsolete when the route is imported into T:ANE and up.

The built-in and DLC assets can't be imported into TRS19 from TS12 SP1 HF4 and T:ANE due to how N3V encrypts this content. Most of these assets have been uploaded to the DLS so the content is accessible except for purchased assets from N3V's DLC server.

For your trolley assets, Black Diamond has created some trolley catenary for the Illinois Railway Museum. The IRM catenary works very nicely and looks the part for a busy transit system. As usual, there are various components, all splines that are easy to put down. Paul Z May made some tram poles and related wire. The poles are track objects that snap to the rails and then a 20 meter (65 ft) trolley wire spline is lined up with the insulators. There are various styles and types of poles with various spanners and insulators and all work quite well and are easy to place. Paul's poles and nets are in the traditional trolley pole style that we saw in many locations including Boston and Philadelphia and continue to do so even today.

Ultimately, as you can see, I decided to go ahead and give T:ANE a try. That said, I'm not yet ready to make the transition, so I think I'll at least take some time to try and complete this current project in TS12.


Thank you all for the input you offered.

When making content, make it with a 3.7 build number. These will work in both TS12 and Tane.

With respect to '30s cars, jayholland did a bunch on the DLS. Most are UK? prototypes, but many wouldn't look out-of-place on a US layout.