The L&NE, DL&W, and NYSW are coming alive in Trainz

That's neat that you family ties up there. The time period I'm doing allows me to incorporate a few different RR's with the DL&W, including the Utica & Black RR, The Westshore, New York Central, NY,Ontario and Western, Mohawk and Malone ( east of Remsen, coming across a bridge over the west Canada Creek at Trenton Falls, then servicing the limestone quarry in Prospect, into Remsen and then heading north east toward Thendara) . I'm wrapped up in making structures of homes and industries as I go.
Just curious if you've taken a trip out of Utica going north with the Adirondack Scenic RR. The run excursions several times a year......except this one, since they've got everything shut down.
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I'd love to help you doing scenery on yours but I can't leave mine unattended. I'm selfish, I know. You'll probably want to cut and paste a few acres of scenery and rotate them so it doesn't look cut and pasted. In rural areas , it helps to speed things up.
I hope you keep giving updates. Sounds like a great project [/URL][/IMG]

JimDep, I actually have ridden on the Adirondack Scenic RR, although not out of Utica. My family vacations just outside of Thendara in Old Forge so I have ridden the train out of Thendara and into Forestport or however far their smaller excursions go southward too many times to count, and I think I’ve bought a good bit of my HO scale models out of the gift shop in the Thendara station. The area and railroad itself are amazing and the old motive power always resonated with me. I’ll have to take the excursion out of Utica one of these times. I’m excited to see your route, seeing as the area is like a second home to me

I'm really happy to hear that. You know Thendara and Forestport and how amazing and inspiring the atmosphere is there. Great people with a rich history. Can you imagine how cool it must have been to be able to ride on the Mohawk and Malone all the way up to Malone NY !
The original settlers had to be tough to survive the winters. Every season is incredible. That western region of the Adirondacks, Brown's tract and along the Black River heading up to Carthage , all through out there.
Looking forward to when the Adirondack Scenic RR can reopen again.
Here's a Trainz model of the Erie Lackawanna Freight house on Water Street in Utica.

Here is what will be part 1 of the whole L&NE Sub. This is the section I will be focusing on the most and releasing first. I like using the OSM textures instead of the Google Earth Raster Map textures since I can make out roads and rivers. I have to trim out just about all of the black baseboards but this is still a whole lot of track. The only thing that is really bugging me at this point is the Lackawanna Cutoff, where the track in many areas is raised on fill quite a good distance in the air, which unfortunately TransDEM did not model it, why it did not is beyond me since the fill still prominently exists today. I should have a fun time trying to correct that, along with many other track areas that have inaccurate raises and valleys that they fall on. At least this time around I know where I am on the route.





Here is my favorite area on the route, the portion that runs through my family's farm. We drive tractors on the railbed now, but the cinder ballast and old fence post ties still litter the area. I'll start the route scenery here , and work my way up to Sussex Borough, and from there down to the Delaware Viaduct, and then shift my focus to the Lackawanna Cutoff, since that unfortunately needs the most attention paid to it. Regardless this route still pleases me a lot the way it is.

woah, this is looking real nice! cant wait for the rest!

The Lackawanna Cutoff is the route that is taking the best shape on the route right now. After taking a break from the game for a while for research and other means of gathering info for this project, I started again by laying gradients and making the land around the cutoff as real as possible up to Greendell, where this picture is taken by the interlocking tower that still barely stands today. This was made to represent a shot of GP35 2560 shooting through the same spot, although I can't find it in any place other than a Chuck Walsh video to show it here. As you can see, scenery is not much of anything yet, the most I have done is placed interlocking towers and stations in their proper spots so I know how to lay terrain/sidings around them. Grades on the cutoff are now 95% prototypical at +-0.55% being the max, except for outside of Roseville Tunnel/Port Morris where it is getting tricky. I have decided the Cutoff will most likely be the first part I work on and release, running from roughly Dover, NJ until some area before Scranton, mainly because Chuck Walsh on YouTube covers this so well while the other roads have little to no info about them. I am on the fence as to whether I want the line to look like its 1930s-50s heyday, with little trees around the fills and cuts, with a double-tracked mainline w/passing sidings, in the EL/Conrail stages with one main line and no Old Road, or as the line exists today, with trees closed right up to the roadbed and "under NJT control" since they are laying track up to Andover. Lastly, I could make the line in its "what-if" time, when EL was supposed to merge with the Chessie System, or if the line eventually fell in to CSX/NS/NYSW/Amtrak control. Let me know what you all want to see, I personally feel like I want EL-Era but with certain areas resembling modern-day operations i.e. grade crossings, single-track on the WB side, and an Andover Station, but again, what the people want I will do

So here we are, after about a year, this route is finally starting to get off the ground. After working on and off through this project throughout the last year, mostly in TransDEM fine-tuning the route, I and two other very talented individuals have started to put time into the route Trainz-side, and its coming along nicely for just 3-4 days of detailing. Tkmfarmrailfan and I have been working on the Western end of the Cutoff in the Delaware Water Gap, with me grading and superelevating track up to Slateford Junction, and he has been using his eye for detail on adding trees, texturing, and various other details that I just cannot do. Then, on the East end, another Trainzer who would rather work without credit is sprucing up the section from Lake Lackawanna up to Greendell Station, and he is additionally blowing me away with his detailing abilities. I had to realize that I cannot enjoy detailing by myself, I just enjoy the route generation and train running, so I am so glad that these two talented people have decided to help me in this. Here are a few screenshots of the route in its infancy, at the Delaware Water Gap, Paulinskill Viaduct, and Roseville Tunnel/Byram. I hope to consistently plug away at this along with the other Trainzers. This project now has a new meaning to me with the new hopes of the Cutoff's reactivation in the near future, so now I am more motivated than ever to see this route completed! In shot 1, we see a NY-100 barreling onto the Cutoff at Slateford.

And here is NY-100 in the early 1970s in the same spot

Now, here is the 100 at Paulinskill Viaduct, heading over the NYS&W and L&NE mainlines at Hainesburg

And now, we see a Conrail manifest over Roseville Road towards the tunnel

And finally, two shots of Byram, on the western side of the Roseville Tunnel

nikkigirl1 said:

And here is NY-100 in the early 1970s in the same spot

Click to expand...

Hey Nikkigirl, thanks for the update.........the route is coming along GREAT ! That's quite a project from a region I really like. Pictures like this help a lot for doing the texturing and getting a feel for the overall scenery dynamics. Glad to hear that your making progress .