The Copy and Paste Tool has its limits.

JonMyrlennBailey

Active member
Depending upon the content of the ground and the size of the ground you are trying to copy and paste, you may have trouble. This tool is ideal for simple sections of a route. If the section has something complicated like a big roundhouse full of engines, you may end up with a mess. I just did a major overhaul of my yard. I made the tracks more realistic by placing the parallel track close together. I had the tracks too far apart and that put the yard building facility too far in the background away from the front edge of the benchwork since this is a model layout. I used the Bakersfield yard in Mojave Sub as a guide for setting up a prototypical yard by taking measurements of the tracks, ladder and spline points with the ruler. I used Copy/Paste to shift the building complex about 150 feet closer to the front edge of the benchwork. Most of the content in that section of ground was OK but the engines vanished and the roundhouse got screwed up. The tracks inside the roundhouse ended up protruding outside the walls of the building and many static objects as doors, soda machines, garbage cans, workers, etc. got dislocated. I had to delete reinstall the roundhouse from scratch and place all the furniture inside back by hand. It helps to have the roundhouse on a different layer while trying to move fixtures and furniture around inside it so your grab tool doesn't move the roundhouse instead of the soda machine you are trying to neatly place against the back wall. Rearranging my railroad yard took about 12 hours still and now I have to reinstall Trainz 2012 because the AI function in Driver got goofy again. Commands were disobeyed or incorrectly executed. Doing much editing in Surveyor tends to break down the program over time. I had been also having trouble with Trainz shutting down involuntarily and that is also and indication the a fresh install is needed.

In the following picture you will see the rectangular yard lot paved in dark asphalt that got shifted forward about a half a football field length. The Copy/Paste tool does seem to maintain tracks and spline items well as long as you don't try to select a piece of content-rich real estate too large. Copy/Paste is ideal for covering a big flat area as a large forest with trees fast if you like 3D static trees and not speed trees or spline trees. In the background you will see the two entrance/exit paved drives leading from the highway in the rear to the yard lot. Formerly, the yard lot was right up against the road in the background making it not so much as an attraction for viewing at the bench edge in the foreground. The yard is now more realistic and yard scenery is now closer so detail is easier to view. The yard consist of a roundhouse, a speeder shed, fueling points with pumps, cooling tower, crates full of locomotive parts, oil and fluid products, tack maintenance parts, spools, drums, sanding tower, water tower, caboose track, a maintenance train track, and locomotive tracks. There are sheds for track maintenance and there are garages that house the maintenance-of-way trucks. This yard serves a local railroad district. A county railroad division is the next higher level. The two tracks forward of the telephone poles are the main line. Further back, is the runaround track in front with three ladder tracks for parking and assembling rolling stick. At the back and separate from the closely-spaced ladder steps is the locomotive and yard service track. Engines can get resanded, rewatered, refueled here. Cabooses can be picked up on the way out. Certain special rolling stock is parked on sidings off this track. Yard switchers, maintenance train with crane car and gondola, snow blower train and another siding for a long engine , eg Big Boy or Norfolk & Western articulated steam engine, too large to fit in the roundhouse.

XF7WBf.jpg



Here is a picture I made with measurements between spline points for that perfect American yard ladder. The opposite end will be a mirror image. Measurements are in feet. The yard tracks should be so that the ballast edges of JR terrain track, after the Smooth spline tool is used to drop the ground below the track by 0.20 meters, just touch side by side in wireframe view.

XF58fR.jpg
 
Last edited:
If you move an object like a roundhouse you need to break the track connection from it. Copy and paste will try and move the roundhouse with the track still attached so the track splines get stretched across the route.
 
To add to that, train consists lose their positioning because the sessions are built around world coordinates within Trainz. The session when saved remembers the original coordinates but you changed them by moving the object elsewhere. Some assets such as stations and industries can move a consist along with them, but there are some conditions that apply there such as the length of the of the consist on the fixed-track object. If the asset fits within the fixed track, the consist will move along with it, but if it hangs over, it'll derail.
 
A yard on a Trainz layout is something you really want to try to get perfect the first time. It's not something you would like to rearrange later on after your session is well established. It's not exactly portable like a suitcase. In physical model railroading, the yard design is always the brain buster.
 
A yard on a Trainz layout is something you really want to try to get perfect the first time. It's not something you would like to rearrange later on after your session is well established. It's not exactly portable like a suitcase. In physical model railroading, the yard design is always the brain buster.

I totally agree, Jon. You have to watch where you're laying your track so a train doesn't go through a maintenance building on it's way to a job! I've done that!

Dave
 
I totally agree, Jon. You have to watch where you're laying your track so a train doesn't go through a maintenance building on it's way to a job! I've done that!

Dave

I've finally managed to get the geometry of yard track laying just right, you know, the ladder has to be a very acute angle to get the parallel tracks at close intervals. The Mojave Sub has an excellent examples of yard track laying. I took a screenshot and made spline point measurements with the ruler. This is the reason I had to shift things around in my yard to begin with. My tracks were too wide apart. When the ladder is very acute, the switch points will be very long and one has to be careful not to put a lever right on top of a pair of frogs. The frogs are stationary while the points move.
 
For yard a yard ladder, take a look at <kuid:37522:9972> CS Yard Template 1. The tracks aren't attached to this and are instead laid down on top of it. There are small points along the way where track splines go, and the yard ladder is laid out perfectly.

To keep drivers from driving through maintenance sheds, I use track marks in the middle of tracks rather than after junctions to ensure the AI have moved passed the place where they can take a scenic tour.
 
For yard a yard ladder, take a look at <kuid:37522:9972> CS Yard Template 1. The tracks aren't attached to this and are instead laid down on top of it. There are small points along the way where track splines go, and the yard ladder is laid out perfectly.

To keep drivers from driving through maintenance sheds, I use track marks in the middle of tracks rather than after junctions to ensure the AI have moved passed the place where they can take a scenic tour.


John:

I downloaded and checked this template out. It has curves in IT as sharp as 32 meters. The curves in the yard of Bakersfield, California are no sharper than 300 meters in radius at any point. The crossover on my main line to the yard had a curve as sharp as 85 meters. Here is an areal photo of my yard at the north end. The south end mirrors the north. The yard is 7,078.50 feet feet in length and each lead at either end is 7,295 feet in length. There is a wye off of the south yard lead which can turn around a UP Big Boy doubleheader.

1cLt8cI.jpg
 
Last edited:
Back
Top