Creating Prototypical looking road crossings, that look good

Hi guys, hope everyone is doing well!

This is a just a quick gauge of what to do in terms of creating road crossings. I'm going to be using a combination of ATLS/TRC crossing assets to create flexible crossings. I have a problem though, I've included two screenshots of different scenarios. Both use separate invisible roads to generate realistic traffic, and JR RM marking splines/FG Road marking assets.

Option 1: Road surface raised to track level using Yarn no traffic road. This gives the benefit of the road and track level being the same height, as is usually the case in the real world, however, it's much more fiddly to make and align the markings for. Plus, I believe that having splines everywhere can have a negative impact on frames, and buildings never quite look right as they're usually sunk behind the sidewalk.

Screenshot_267 by Jack Clare, on Flickr

Option 2: Road surface is painted onto the terrain. This gives much more flexibility in terms of how wide the road can be, and I think it just generally looks better with the ability to mix paints, but you have this situation where a car would have to go _/\_ when crossing the track, which personally I think looks awful.

Screenshot_268 by Jack Clare, on Flickr

So I guess my question is, does anyone have any tips to build road/track junctions that don't take forever to make (there are going to be a lot on this route), and look accurate and half-decent? Any work-arounds?

Many many thanks in advance

Jack

The problem is that the Yarnish sidewalks are too high. This is true on Yarnish street w/ sidewalk splines or Yarnish sidewalks alone.

Here is what I do: Use any Yarnish road without sidewalks to connect to the crossing. Then use a flat sidewalk (no thickness) and place the sidewalks on either side of the street. Run them to the nearest intersection (unconnected). The flat sidewalk I use is Sidewalk 12FT. Too wide for this situation? Move the sidewalk under the road so it is narrower. Notice how it goes under the road? The only additional work is the placement of the two sidewalk splines.

This works best if the land is very level near the crossing, if not, you will have do some additional work such as adding additional spline points to the sidewalk and then fine tuning elevations.

If you want to be truly artistic about this, go outside and look at your front yard (or someone else's if you haven't got one yourself). The walk is at grass-ground level. There is a wider residential sidewalk, then a planting strip, all at grass level. Then the curb (Eng. kerb), then the street. Note that the top of the curb is at grass-level, while the street is from 2" to a foot lower than grass.

That holds true downtown, too, the store doors are at the sidewalk; the sidewalk is above the paved street.

The point? Bury your streets and sidewalks, elevate your grass and use the terrain tool to create the necessary gradients and drainages to construct your crossing. Track is always elevated above grass, even in a cutting. There are ditches either side, or your train would sink into the mud. Use the terrain tools to bring your pavement to rail height and use one of the many crossing (xing) plates, some of which are traffic stoppers.

If you're creating roads with textures, invisible roads are great, but if you're using YARNish roads not use the traffic-bearing ones?

Use one of the roads with a built-in elevation to bring the pavement to the railhead, ditch the road both sides and raise the grass!

(I've got a couple of the painted roads with various invisible roadways and in Surveyor traffic just pours across, but in Driver I never see a car on one of those. Can't figure it.)

:B~)

Ahh brilliant! Thanks very much for the tips guys!

Yeah schweitzerdude I wasn't too sure about the Yarnish Sidewalk but it seemed like the only one I could find that looked okay, but the Sidewalk 12ft/Sidewalk 4ft Median assets look miles better.

So something like this?

Screenshot_269 by Jack Clare, on Flickr

RHKluckhohn I know what you mean about the track always being higher, that definitely holds true for heavy rail segregated running, however with this being a light rail system running through city suburbs I always kinda thought the track was level with the surroundings, not above it. Plus with the Trainz baseboard being a grid and my desire to put buildings/parking lots pretty much right up against the track, I think messing with the terrain may become troublesome

As for your point about the invisible roads not generating traffic in driver mode, I absolutely hate this. I usually put a normal road that actually generates traffic in driver mode, just out of shot. Seems to do the trick!

Where did you find the TRC crossing gate? The TRC Cantilevers don't have any gates.

rs2007 said:

Where did you find the TRC crossing gate? The TRC Cantilevers don't have any gates.

Click to expand...

See "Grade Xing NRC OH" by bnsf50, there are a number with gates, compatible with ATLS, TRC and My Level Crossings.

Jack, another sidewalk you might like is <kuid2:506208:1614:1> Treadway Narrow Sidewalk Spline, a favorite of mine. Deep enough to make a city street but can be buried to make a path.

Granted, light rail requires less earth movement, but there's still some drainage to arrange. The issue of ditching in Trainz, with its 5-meter minimum, is real. If you're street-running one has only to sink the track to suit but getting realistic ground levels is tough. There are a limited number of grass planes as fixed objects that can be used but they rarely match the textures you want. There are embankment splines that would help but again the texture match can be an issue.

By the way, in the picture above there's no street drainage. Sidewalks keep the water on the road until it finds a drain....

Bob
:B~)

rs2007 said:

Where did you find the TRC crossing gate? The TRC Cantilevers don't have any gates.

Click to expand...

Yeah rs2007 the assset in the shot is TRC US Co 1L Scenery, there's quite a few like that if you search for TRC US

Bob this is sorta what I'm modelling after, I thought I'd attach the link to streetview because it's easy to move around and see what I'm looking at, it just seems like road surface and the top of the railhead are the same height.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.021...4!1s0_uPkQvQ-2tgviN3mknv6w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

To the South the light rail alignment is on ballasted track, and to the North it's on a fixed concrete base, but this is the sort of thing I'm aiming for. Without creating my own custom crossings, I don't think it's going to be possible to make the road texture by raising the ground and painting, it looks like the road surface will have to be on splines.

I'm in the process of downloading your FDL Fond du Lac route to see how you did your crossings and to have a play on it!

Edit: I just created this little thing by raising the terrain and painting, based on what I saw from Approach Medium's excellent youtube series. Seems to work okay, but I think it'll only work when the track is running North-South/East-West, the way texturing is done on Trainz. Splines give more flexibility, but I was hoping to avoid putting splines everywhere

Screenshot_270 by Jack Clare, on Flickr

Jack

JackClare1995 said:

I'm in the process of downloading your FDL Fond du Lac route to see how you did your crossings and to have a play on it!

Jack

Click to expand...

That's looking pretty good!

One thing you won't find with FDL is consistency! Some crossings have plates, some have missed out. Some are self-contained crossings, some are ATLS and some are Atilaxings (My Level Crossings 3 and 3a). The route was started about Christmas of 2009 in '09 and has kind of just growed through 12 into T:ANE.

An issue with the off-the-shelf crossings is most aren't height-adjustable which leads to lots of finicky terrain-poking to get the surround looking real-ish while avoiding bumps in the track. Although many crossings seem to have built-in bumps. You can see that if you hang off one of the cars as you cross.

One bugaboo is mismatched road heights using road splines. There are a bunch of good-looking road splines available but so often one series does not meet another at the same height. I developed the philosophy of matching the road to the crossing to avoid gaposis and letting any gaps due to different roads occur as far as possible from the rail line so they're less noticeable.

Road intersections are another source of displeasure; many on the DLS are purely downtown urban but as you'll see in FDL they are not what you find out the window. I replaced a lot of them with intersections built from unmarked pavement, straightened and linked with invisible road where I wanted cars to turn the corner. It really takes no longer than fiddling a pre-built into the right alignment and eliminates gaps if you use roads from the same series. Again you'll find that inconsistent. That technique also gets around the occasional breaking of an intersection asset by a Trainz upgrade.

:B~)

P.S.

I didn't ride that leg of Calgary Transit on my last visit, just the NW and NE legs, out to the Zoo.

:B~)

Where did you get the rXr road text?

rossd58 said:

Where did you get the rXr road text?

Click to expand...

It's made by felix_g on the download station. Search for FG road marking.

Hello, all...

I've been having some success by simply not using actual crossing assets -- I've found that the ATLS/TRS controller doesn't actually need to see a crossing asset to do it's work. I just set it to search forward and backward for ZERO crossings and then set the triggers, slaves, lights, gates and traffic stoppers up as 'normal'.

I will, however, use two and sometimes three channels/controllers per crossing -- has been working well for me.



Xing 1 - Level crossing; curved road; curved track - driver view






Xing 1 - Level crossing; curved road; curved track - surveyor view






Xing 2 - Gradient/curved track; gradient/curved road - driver view







Xing 2 - Gradient/curved track; gradient/curved road - surveyor view






Xing 3 - Curved track; straight road section - driver view







Xing 3 - Curved track; straight road section - surveyor view -- three controllers as there is a siding directly behind the camera





It took a bit of fiddling, but once I worked it out, it's pretty straightforward to set up.