Luddite Annie goes Plus.

Latest odd behaviour from TS2019. I used the 'Find Object' menu to reference an engine at Robertsbridge and it tried to fob me off by pointing to a completely different engine at Northiam where I happened to be working. It's done this a couple of times now and I certainly never had any of this daft behaviour when I was working in TS2012.

I've only tried to make one session in it so far and most industries either flat out don't work or have weird behaviour. I have enough to do in Tane for now anyway but, well but will do lol.

I haven't tried making any scheduled sessions either yet. With a single line light railway like this one I just make sure the session contains all the commands I want and and run what amounts to a very simple timetable by giving drivers commands as I go along.
As for industries I tried using M.I.N. industry tracks when TS2019 was first released and the only thing they would do is seize hold of a cut of wagons as well as the shunting engine and never give them back. I tried everything I could think of, folk here on the forums gave me advice and nothing made any difference. This K&ESR layout originally had M.I.N. tracks, but it doesn't now because I deleted them. I might look at something else like LARS or BI3 tracks later, but for now it's not a priority.

A big surprise was discovering that TS2019 doesn't do Autosaves. After doing route building in TS2012 I was very used to Surveyor doing a save every 15 minutes and it saved my bacon more than once when we had sudden power cuts during stormy weather. I just assumed that TS2019 did the same, but it seems it doesn't and the daily backups are the only safety net. Should I now set the daily backups to 27? Or just do paranoid saves every half an hour? Saving to CDP was something I did regularly with TS2012 so it looks like I'll have to the same, but more so with TS2019.

Robertsbridge still very WIP, but getting there. I've ordered a digital full size copy of the 1908 OS map for Robertsbridge from the National Library of Scotland since there's a lot that needs to be done at Robertsbridge and it will make it a lot easier with a big map instead of the much smaller webpage maps on the NLS site. Fortunately in 1908 many things that I was concerned about at Robertsbridge weren't there yet and there's fields and allotments instead so that will make for a lot less work.
A lot of time was taken up with sorting track alignments and levelling the site of the sawmill at Robertsbridge as well as sorting out its siding. The sawmill site was anything but level and part of it went up the side of hill with the buildings all higgledy piggledy. I've seen this kind of thing before with routes I've downloaded from the DLS where industry sites and station yards haven't been levelled before putting trackwork and buildings in place and it just makes for endless problems.
TS2019 is behaving itself very nicely so far and I'm finding I'm liking using it for route building more and more as time goes on.

Certainly looking very nice Annie, and there's hope for me using TRS19 yet. Your encouragement is helpful, if unintentional :hehe:

Thanks Alikiwi. TS2019 has its quirks and annoyances, but then so did TS2009 and TS2012 which I've also used for building routes. It's just a case of getting used to them and working around them really. Overall I'm happy enough to consider it a useful tool for route building and I'll start to make a transition away from route building in TS2012. I liked using TS2012, but with it only being a 32 bit version of Trainz I was pushing it to the edge of its capabilities with building my very detailed Norfolk route so I could see the writing on the wall about needing to step up to TS2019.

Tenterden 1908 WIP. Having to level the station yard and rework transitions as well as fix endless amounts of floating trackwork made this station and its good yards a real mission and a half to get into a workable state. Next will be sorting the town and fixing all the buildings by the Plonk Down Building Co. so the town actually does look like a town where people live. Since the town is only a background piece I won't be going mad on detailing though.

This pop up message box is still being a confounded nuisance. I call it the 'Fun Destroyer'. Even if the message box is turned off it still messes things up with placing splines. Lightly brush another spline circle by accident and the spline you were trying to place will be gone and you have to start again. Holding down the shift key makes no difference at all.

How bad this situation is really came home to me when I was doing some work on a large station on my TS2012 Norfolk layout and I realised that what I was doing would be near impossible if the spline eating 'Fun Destroyer' was let loose. I can cope by using a work around with my test K&ESR layout since it's a small light railway in open countryside, but I'd have to forget it if it was a larger project.

I plan on completing the K&ESR layout, but after that I don't know. This is approaching game breaker status with the likely outcome that I won't make use of TS2019 for route building after this. Suggestions about using layers have been made earlier in this thread, but they are off the table for me due to the cognitive problems I have due to narcolepsy.

It is annoying, Annie. We asked about that message being eliminated and we were told possible, but it hasn't happened yet. In this case, layers wouldn't help anyway unless you put grass splines on a Grass-spline layer, etc. That can get messy even for those that don't have your condition because like a lot of things here the ends aren't quite finished up so we ended up with a lot of nice tools that need a lot of extra polishing.

Thanks for your reply John. It's yet another one of those weird situations with TS2019 with there being a lot I like about it, but with an 'updated function' that wasn't useful in the slightest thrown in to ruin it all. Perhaps i was dropped on my head when I was a baby, but I want to like TS2019, but silly bugs like that pop up message box make it a total uphill battle.

I get that message when I try to make a point junction too near where the track joins a fixed track item. In that case I make the junction further away and then move it to where I want it. I've found this particularly with my work on Steve Flanders mixed gauge track when using his SF GWR MG Guide.

That's the Track Type one John, there's also one for ordinary scenic splines as well and both are an absolute nuisance. Sometimes the Track Type one turns up when I'm doing scenic work so I really don't know what's going on there.

KotangaGirl said:

That's the Track Type one John, there's also one for ordinary scenic splines as well and both are an absolute nuisance. Sometimes the Track Type one turns up when I'm doing scenic work so I really don't know what's going on there.

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It's confusing because ordinary splines are now considered a kind of track. There are specific tags in the config.txt file along with other parameters (tags) within the mesh-tables that determine this.

The 'unified' track-types started in TS12 SP1 HF0. When this change was first implemented, I reported a bug ASAP where track-objects such as track markers and direction markers ended up attaching themselves to catenary and nearby fences and grass splines. Until this bug was fixed, we could drive our trains down the lineside grass and fences if we wanted to!

With the track marks and direction marks attaching themselves to catenary, this presented an issue where the AI would naturally ignore these because they weren't on the actual track, but for the most part they looked like they were in the properly location. I spent hours, and I mean many of them, trying to figure out why some trams were heading down the wrong tracks. In T:ANE and up this would have been easy to spot because there would be shadows under the marker in Surveyor, but with this being TS12, there are none. At one point, I decided it was time to remove the tracks and relay them just because. When I was pulling down the catenary, I found the track markers and direction markers attached to the wires. Bingo!

No wonder new chums to Trainz end up being horribly confused. Thanks for the explanation John.
I've been taking a break from TS2019 with sorting out some new timetabling on my TS2012 Norfolk layout as well as making minor signalling adjustments, but I will be making a return to working on the K&ESR fairly soon.

My Trainz Plus+ install is now updated to 110491 and it was easy peasy. No having to sacrifice the neighbourhood children to Moloch, no extended extended database repairs, nothing faulty, nothing missing any dependencies. Perhaps I'm still asleep and just dreaming about updating Trainz Plus+ and I'll wake up in a minute.

I thought I'd download the new Liskeard & Looe route to see what it was like. Ages ago I attempted to build a pre-grouping version of the Liskeard & Looe, but I was still pretty new to Trainz back then and didn't have the necessary skills to make a proper job of it and it all ended in tears. The new route is diesel era (sigh), but the route itself looks to have been really well done. I haven't tried any of the sessions yet because I haven't got the foggiest idea how to drive a diesel and I'm sure my grandad and uncles would all turn over in their graves if I tried.

I took a deep breath and updated the Cornish Mainline route to the latest TS2019 standards. Fortunately I've only just had fibre internet installed so all this downloading took no time at all. I have to say that the new sessions look good, though I've only tried the Falmouth trip session as yet (clean run, 5 star score, - yay me!). The old sessions with everything from 1920-1960 from all over the British Isles thrown into Cornwall were pretty dreadful, - so I'm hoping that the new sessions will be a vast improvement.
Criticisms? - the signalling is still awful and the seriously old legacy signals with huge blazing coronas should have been replaced, - or at least had their coronas modified to quiet them down a bit. The line to Falmouth looked like it had been abandoned for more than a year in most places with the amount of weed growth covering everything. And with trees pressing in so close into the line it was a forest fire waiting to happen. A lot of the time trying to see the line ahead from the cab was downright awkward due to trees overhanging the line.
I'm slowly building a 1880s Broad Gauge version of the Falmouth Branch so I am a bit of a Cornwall nut when it comes to pre-grouping railways, -so it would be awfully nice if these problems could be fixed at some time in the future and then I think this route really could shine.

And the other comment I must make is that SP2 runs smooth as silk. I have it installed on a i5 CoolerMaster computer with 16Gb of RAM and a GTX660 video card. Plainly I don't have all options set to the max and I have shadows turned off, but despite that everything looked good, - or good enough for my eyesight at least.

Congratulations on your updating, Annie!

I didn't hear any bangs or feel any bumps so I assumed everything went okay.

I agree the amount of overgrowth on Falmouth line is a bit too much. Even some of our very badly maintained industrial branches, that see a freight delivery once a month, aren't that bad.

You can edit these routes in Plus, however, you can't merge them or do anything like that. What this means is you can use this route as a basis for something else if you with such as replacing the track with broad gauge and perhaps cleaning up the overgrowth.

That gives me an idea. Replacing some of the bridges and houses with typical New England types, and the Liskeard and Looe route would look a lot like where I live. I could then replace the rolling stock with North American types and I would then have a fictional New England line.

Thanks John, - it's all been fairly painless so far. During the GWR Churchward era a lot of changes happened on the old Cornish Railway and West Cornwall Railway lines so to take this route back to the Broad Gauge era would be a lot of work, but it is something to think about. At least from all the research I've done I do have a reasonable idea of just what exactly is involved.

The Liskeard and Looe wasn't built by the GWR as it was an independent railway company until it was absorbed into the GWR. It's a fascinating line and in many ways hasn't changed much at all from the 1920s era. Moorswater is perhaps the most profoundly changed part of the line since the village was demolished and much of the landscape was massively changed when the modern motorways were built after the war. Another possibility for me to think about for a future project.
I like your ideas for making a New England conversion of the route and think it would work out really well.

KotangaGirl said:

The Liskeard and Looe...

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I've seen this route in the latest newsletter, is it the same route as the freeware Liskeard to Looe route by marky7890? It looks very much like it!

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?144219-Liskeard-to-Looe&p=1657967#post1657967

There's no acknowledgment of an author as far as I can see in the newsletter. Have N3V offered a freeware route for sale as payware?

Rob.

The Content Store says asset ID is <kuid2:179051:102285:7>.

HPL said:

The Content Store says asset ID is <kuid2:179051:102285:7>.

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kuid 179051 is marky7890 - thanks HPL.

In that case I've no need to buy it! Plenty of Class 47's and Class 153's on the DLS, if ever I need them!

Rob.

Sorry Annie - off topic!