What Should Be The Maximum Miles Used On A Trainz Route?

R

Railroader1970

Member
Is there any general rule about this? I'm working on a route that is supposed to go from Nisku AB to Red Deer AB which is around 80mls. At 2.5 baseboards that roughly make up a mile, you can imagine how many baseboards that equals to if you multiply 80 mls x 2.5 baseboards - - - and don't forget that's not including some extra baseboards to the left or to the right to give more scenery such as small and large hills. I prefer boonie or mountain lines than inside of cities.

I thought about stopping the line at half of 80 MLS as a turn around point for the road switchers. Then I would do the other half from an already established railyard I have in Red Deer. Would this be a better idea? I'm thinking about the time loading factor on the computer it would take to actually load the route. Not interested in waiting 20 minutes for a route to load thanks.

- RR70

P.S.

I would load one of the routes but it would be new as I would be new at making a route, so I'm not interested in becoming a filet mignon to the critics.
 
Do you have interesting stuff to place all along the entire 80 miles? If not, consider this. Make four ~10x5 baseboard segments separated by 3 2x2 segments.

Each 10x5 baseboard segment can be highly detailed.

The 2x2 segment separators are "off screen" and are just bare-bones baseboards with tracks. Trains can pass through these segments at regular speeds or you can put trackmarks and triggers to force a longer period of time to simulate how long it would take to travel through 10-20 actual baseboards.

You "hide" these segments by putting backdrops around them. If you want to go further, you can make tunnel entrances to them.

This concept goes back to the physical model (HO) railroad days where you had to simulate long distances.
 
MP242 said:
I am unsure what the maximum allowable size is.
Click to expand...

512MB max
ujJVe09.jpg


Cheers
 
A 500 miles as the crow fly's ? Cause 500 miles strait is going to be a heck of lot more track :D More of a question is , what State do you want to try . DE RI ? LOL

Matt
 
Ask yourself what is the interesting part of the route. Likely the cities, towns, yards, industries, sidings, some interesting geographical locations and the few miles around those.
Ask yourself if you would be interested in staring at your screen for 5+ minutes during boring landscape in which there is nothing to keep you busy (no speed change or nothing).

What would you like to play?

I am still wondering how I am going to make parts of this route interesting during sessions, while I already reduced most distances by 25% and skipped miles of farm land.
 
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Ask yourself what is the interesting part of the route. Likely the cities, towns, yards, industries, sidings, some interesting geographical locations and the few miles around those.
Ask yourself if you would be interested in starting at your screen for 5+ minutes during boring landscape in which there is nothing to keep you busy (no speed change or nothing).

What would you like to play?
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more with that statement . Now having several large DEM . I'm starting to see a big disadvantages to vary long DEM,s . Unless there's a goal or challenge to running the length of the line . Such as grade , traffic or tasks to done along the way

Matt
 
RR70 --

Your maths might be incorrect. I think it should be 80 divided by 2.5. That's certainly a manageable size in terms of maximum file upload. The real question, however, is the time it might take you to actually complete the route. One lifetime or several? And that will depend on the level of detail.
 
Hi

The built in ECML route in Tane and TRS19 is 400 miles long with multiple tracks and other side routes to Hull, Lincoln and Cleethorpes etc . It runs without issue on my 3 year old computer so you have plenty of scope for an 80 mile route.

Regards

Brian
 
oknotsen said:
Ask yourself what is the interesting part of the route. Likely the cities, towns, yards, industries, sidings, some interesting geographical locations and the few miles around those.
Ask yourself if you would be interested in staring at your screen for 5+ minutes during boring landscape in which there is nothing to keep you busy (no speed change or nothing).

What would you like to play?

I am still wondering how I am going to make parts of this route interesting during sessions, while I already reduced most distances by 25% and skipped miles of farm land.
Click to expand...

I faced the same problem on my Norfolk layout where one of the lines crosses an expanse of fen land with trains doing nothing but chasing the horizon across a flat landscape of rough grass pasture. My fen land scenic section ended up being just on a Trainz scale mile long which is nowhere near what the distance across the fens actually is in Norfolk, but it works fine and it certainly gives the impression of the fens without me collapsing in utter boredom while driving trains on this section.

Edit: I also found that modelling an 'empty' landscape to be much harder that modelling a normal landscape with all the usual scenic assets such as trees and buildings & etc.
 
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Out of interest I recently extracted a portion of Iranian (!) route as the geography looked quite interesting. Unbeknown to me the prototype section is in the region of 300km long. Using the Transdem process with a width of 7 tiles either side of the track line, 5m grid for the right of way only, the .gnd file was a staggering 882Mb. It took around 10 minutes to open in Surveyor. I deleted it!
 
KotangaGirl said:
I faced the same problem on my Norfolk layout where one of the lines crosses an expanse of fen land with trains doing nothing but chasing the horizon across a flat landscape of rough grass pasture. My fen land scenic section ended up being just on a Trainz scale mile long which is nowhere near what the distance across the fens actually is in Norfolk, but it works fine and it certainly gives the impression of the fens without me collapsing in utter boredom while driving trains on this section.

Edit: I also found that modelling an 'empty' landscape to be much harder that modelling a normal landscape with all the usual scenic assets such as trees and buildings & etc.
Click to expand...

I'm running into this myself on a very open high prairie portion of a Midwestern/Western US route. The line is 110 miles or around 179 km long. The part from Coalmont, Colorado to the Wyoming border is nearly flat as a pancake. After that the line climbs and twists through some rugged terrain then returns to the flat land again near Laramie, Wyoming. The problem for me is finding the right textures for the region in addition to grass and lots of it. I thought of using the new Turf-FX grass, but that would be a lot of it on this route and I can only see my computer glowing in the dark as I slog through the grassing process.

Since the Coalmont to Walden portion of the line has been gone for about 65 years, I may use a bit of modeling license and put in a few more trees here and there to break up the landscape as well as few more buildings in my nearly non-existent towns that existed along the way.
 
I have some good photos of the Norfolk fens John, and using the grass and wild flower splines available for Trainz as well as individual grass clumps & etc I can reproduce the appearance of the fens reasonably well, but if I do too much the frame rate drops like a stone and my computer's fans start to scream. Mostly now I just use all the nice stuff close to the line and do my best with using ground textures beyond a certain point to let it all fade into the distance.

A flat open 'empty' landscape is certainly a challenge and I wish you well with your own efforts.
 
KotangaGirl said:
I have some good photos of the Norfolk fens John, and using the grass and wild flower splines available for Trainz as well as individual grass clumps & etc I can reproduce the appearance of the fens reasonably well, but if I do too much the frame rate drops like a stone and my computer's fans start to scream. Mostly now I just use all the nice stuff close to the line and do my best with using ground textures beyond a certain point to let it all fade into the distance.

A flat open 'empty' landscape is certainly a challenge and I wish you well with your own efforts.
Click to expand...

I too have seen the same effect from splines. I downloaded a very beautiful route, but I couldn't run it until I did some grass cutting due to the number of grass splines on top of grass splines. Once I cleared the weeds, the frame rates more than doubled

I've looked at Google Earth Street View in places where the camera is available. I've been to the high plains before so I have an idea of what grows out there. There are some unique and gorgeous wildflowers out there in the plains along with various colored grasses, sedges, and small shrubs, but for the most part it's pretty clear of anything in particular. With that said, I think I can do a lot up close where I have to and let the textures do their work in the distance. The forested areas will be a bit easier I think with the tall pines located up in the hills.

Many thanks for the luck. I'll need as much as I can muster up for this route.
 
Thanks for all of the input everyone. I may do a Pt1 route that is 40mls long, then a Pt2 route of the other 40mls. This way I can do both routes separately with details and maybe upload them to the DLS - provided that each route doesn't go over the maximum file size.

- RR70
 
Download the UMR. See how long that thing is. It will take a bit of work before your route is too big.

The real problem is having the time to build the route.
I pretend to have a life. As a result, I hardly have time anymore for Trainz. I had a lot more time when I started my Canadian Prairies route, but then kids "happened". After 3 years I decided to upload what I had finished, which isn't even 25% of what I had in mind.

I say work on the route as 1 big thing, but do it in manageable bites. Upload a section when you think it is playable.
With the route merging problems we have had in the past, uploading two sections might cause problems. Though it might take an hour or so to delete a bunch of baseboards when you end up concluding the route was indeed to big, you might just discover that it does fit as one big route.
 
philskene said:
RR70 --

Your maths might be incorrect. I think it should be 80 divided by 2.5. That's certainly a manageable size in terms of maximum file upload. The real question, however, is the time it might take you to actually complete the route. One lifetime or several? And that will depend on the level of detail.
Click to expand...

I know what you mean. What's always interesting is when I have lots of free time and work on a route, 5 hours go by in a flash. Feels like 1 or 2 hours. There are huge blocks of hills or flat lands where I'm aware that I better make those blocks interesting with some visual artistic merit to make the scenery look interesting - whether it be providing some lakes with variable types of trees, maybe show some camp grounds with a lit fire pit, people in a fishing boat and different colored hills or distant farms etc. Also, I have adjusted speed limits from 50 to 40 down to 30 mph in some zones. All of this takes time of course. So, yeah, it's not like I'll have the first 40 or 50mls on the Part 1 route done anytime soon.

- RR70
 
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