This is a great site for those looking for information on steam locos.

Yes it's one of those hidden treasures on the internet John. It's a website that I use fairly often when I'm researching my 19th century projects.
 
Yes it's one of those hidden treasures on the internet John. It's a website that I use fairly often when I'm researching my 19th century projects.

That's great! It's funny how discoveries of the same information occur amongst us. I'm working on a project for a friend. We're involved in music projects together and I mentioned Trainz of course. Well, it turns out his grandfather was a brakeman for the Erie Railroad back in the early 1910s and his father also worked as a machinist for the Erie but at a different location I can't remember. Through our conversation, he mentioned building the line as an HO model railroad, but was instantly shocked by the cost of everything these days. One thing led to another, and I thought I could easily find the data and build the route. This is where TransDEM, and TRS2019 come in...

The line in particular, where his grandfather worked, is no longer in existence except for a tiny stub off the mainline much to the south. A big chunk of the line is now at the bottom of the Monksville Reservoir in New Jersey and after looking around on the National Map server, I found the DEMs for the area, but struggled to get the topographic maps due to some "fixing" done on the server. Yes, some idiots actually broke some of the map files turning them from needed Geo-Tiff format to regular Tiff files! After digging, I found some PDFs and downloaded those and assembled the route. The process of searching for historical topographic maps overall has become overly complex as things have been broken due to stupidity. My fear a lot of the data will disappear and never be accessible again!

At the moment, I'm laying the track down and interpolating where the ROW is today since the DEM flattened out everything at that point. In other locations, the ROW has become a road, so that's fairly easy to follow. Being a retiree himself, he's now researching photos and having a blast with this project. I have a feeling that eventually he'll end up with TRS2019 himself, or if my budget holds up, I'll get him a copy of Platinum when that goes on sale again.

The steam engines came in when my friend sent me some pics he found of his granddad standing at the cow catcher on the front of a loco. I don't have that particular loco, which I thought I did, but put in an Erie Russian Decapod instead in the same location as the photo and sent him a picture. The western shore of Greenwood Lake is obvious in the photo and the same in the screen capture. I'm sure he'll be surprised I'm sure by the screen shot because I know he can't imagine what can be done when the Trainz gods line up things the right way for us.
 
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That sounds like an interesting project John. I've not felt intrepid enough to attempt doing anything with DEM maps, though I was given a couple of DEM based Trainz maps for a part of Cornwall and Norfolk a while ago, both being areas of Britain than I'm most interested in. The main thing I've used Steam Locomotive dot com for is finding out locomotive and tender weights as well as coal and water capacities as some makers of old legacy locos for Trainz seem to have got their information from wildguess.com.
 
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That sounds like an interesting project John. I've not felt intrepid enough to attempt doing anything with DEM maps, though I was given a couple of DEM based Trainz maps for a part of Cornwall and Norfolk a while ago, both being areas of Britain than I'm most interested in. The main thing I've used Steam Locomotive dot com for is finding out locomotive and tender weights as well as coal and water capacities as some makers of old legacy locos for Trainz seem to have got their information from wildguess.com.

I never did the DEM based maps until about 6 years ago when I started on a big project with another Trainzer. After that, I became addicted to the ease which gives us the terrain. The problem, however, as you can imagine is the amount of data that gets downloaded. The other issue is where do we clip off things? A route downloaded can include lots of branches and additional lines that are out of the scope of the project, but it's a shame to not build them. The process then becomes one of losing scope and biting off more than one can chew. In the case of this particular project, I had to watch this carefully because there are multiple lines still in existence in the area that connect to, or cross this former branch line. When I saw that, I held my breath and did a big chop on the DEM, and included only the maps I need for the project.

I like your description of where the engine spec information came from. I can picture content creators visiting such a site.
 
I've often found myself on that site by accident when i get into deep diving a loco's history. never seek it out but on clicking a promising google link ill see that banner and everything short of a blueprint of every part.

Though I must say, for the casual "that's interesting" locomotive hunt, http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm has some great pages. my signature was discovered on that site, courtesy of Baldwin's "we can build bigger" phase. :hehe:
 
I've often found myself on that site by accident when i get into deep diving a loco's history. never seek it out but on clicking a promising google link ill see that banner and everything short of a blueprint of every part.

Though I must say, for the casual "that's interesting" locomotive hunt, http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/LOCOLOCO/locoloco.htm has some great pages. my signature was discovered on that site, courtesy of Baldwin's "we can build bigger" phase. :hehe:

I have come across this site as well by accident. In my case, I was looking for Erie 4-6-2 Pacific locos.

Way cool.

I like your signature. ;)
 
I did browsed that site to find technical datas for every types of steam locos around the world, and of course most of Indonesia's models (including the pioneer of 2-12-2 wheel arrangement a.k.a "Javanic", the F10 a.k.a SS800) are included. ;)
 
If you look at the section about Valve Gears, you'll find my pictures of Southern 630's Southern valve gear. The picture he had before was not the best of the Southern valve gear, I sent him an E-mail offering my picture of 630's valve gear, which was much better, and he agreed to put it on his website. I've provided several more pictures of 630's valve gear for the website. I also reccomend you try out the Tractive Effort Calc (short for Calculator). This nifty feature allows you to put in the specifics of different steam locomotives and get the tractive effort, weight on drivers, number of axles, weight per axles, and maximum speed. Both of these can be found under 'Builders & Specs', with Valve Gear under the 'Appliances' sub-section. I used the Tractive Effort Calc to figure out what would be the tractive effort of 1/8th scale live steamer if all the specs were built to scale.

Link to Valve Gear section: http://steamlocomotive.com/appliances/valvegear.php
Link to Tractive Effort Calculator: http://steamlocomotive.com/misc/tractiveEffort.php
 
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