[Route] Southern Trans-Pennine

TheAmir259

New member
Greetings everyone,

I have finally decided to start on the community side of my project with this forums post, as i feel like it should be time i make this known. The motive of this post is to make people aware of this route i'm creating, ask for help or recruiting anyone willing to assist, and keeping track of the progress. So with that, let's get this started.

Alright, so in the previous years i've been quite, no, very fascinated by the Woodhead line, and while there were assets and even a route made, it was nowhere near satisfactory, and thus i decided to do one myself. A few attempts were made but eventually i decided to get TransDEM to make things better, and as such the previous works named "Woodhead Route" (on the DLS) are abandoned. With TransDEM, i have all of a sudden become more ambitious, this was about a year ago (2022) and made the map so big that i've called it Southern Trans-Pennine, with a very dreamy endgoal of including all four of the Pennine Crossings. I've gotten myself started once again on the very first route, once again the Woodhead first. But then i got too occupied with work that i eventually had to put it behind, and things got so heated that i didn't have enough space, i simply exported the map into .cdp and put it on my backups folder.

Fast-forward to now, i have suddenly found myself the free time again (due to being unemployed currently) and i have decided to resume this project. I have also realized how big and over-ambitious the plan of having all the four Pennine Crossings are, but the map shall still remain as it currently is, large. The four crossings are:
  • Calder Valley Line (Axed)
  • Huddersfield Line
  • Woodhead Line
  • Hope Valley Line (Axed)
And there will be several connection lines between Sheffield and Leeds, but after reevaluating the feasibility, i have decided only three lines will be built for now:
  1. Woodhead Line
  2. Midland Mainline (Leeds-Sheffield via Normanton)
  3. Huddersfield Line

Number 1 will contain the most amount of references including websites but the main source will be a TrainSim (Classic) route, and as i have researched this route for a few years already, this line should be the least of the problems.

Number 2 is a little problematic as i have decided that the only one with very solid reference thus far is the Leeds to Sheffield - LMS line (DLS, <kuid2:149790:100099:3> by driver_col) although i will definitely want to seek cooperation with the people involved with the route for either assistance/guidance, or credits/copyright matters, or in the case of outright rejection, i may have to go via another route which will definitely make things harder.

Number 3 will be referenced mainly via a TrainSim World route, named Northern Trans-Pennine (sounds familiar huh? I'm sorry my namepick wasn't original at all) but i believe there may be good documentation on the route so i have yet to do research on this one as it would definitely be quite a while before i start on this route. Now that we're done with the briefing, lets get over to the real deal, the progress thus far.

As for the Woodhead, i would be dividing it to 3 phases:
Phase 1 - Broadbottom to Penistone
Phase 2 - Guide Bridge to Wath
Phase 3 - Manchester London Road to Sheffield Victoria (and eventually to Woodhouse)
As of right now (23rd January 2023), i am almost done with the western approach, near Broadbottom and finishing up the Mottram Yard, where afterwards i will move over to the eastern approach, currently ending right before Dunford East Sidings (yard rather).
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you can see, there are barely any decorations as i am still rushing the trackworks for Phase 1 before decorating them. And this is where i feel like i may also want to start asking for help from others, and not let this stay a one-man project any further. As it stands currently, i have yet to upload this to the DLS as i will only do so once i have, at least, solidified the trackworks on Phase 1. I also apologize for the inaccuracies but i don't think i could get it to be more accurate for the time being. Regarding the era and timeline, it isn't really timeless but the layouts that i would be referencing from (from route Number 1 to Number 3) would actually be varying from the 1930s all the way into 1980s, and for now, i will stick to the 1950 eras as this is the case for the Woodhead line that i'm referencing.

This has been quite the long post but i hope to receive any form of feedback from the community, or even opinions about my way of doing this route and so on. I will try to update as much as i can over here whenever necessary or possible. Cheers!
 
A little bit of an update on the route, currently i'm doing what i feel like is the most dreaded part of Phase 1, and that is Penistone and its numerous sidings. But i will not be showing screenshots of that just yet since its still unfinished. Feel free to take a guess where the exact locations are.

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nice project. i have transdem and wanted to make hope valley route but could not find the maps that export with the terrain. where did you find them?
 
nice project. i have transdem and wanted to make hope valley route but could not find the maps that export with the terrain. where did you find them?
You need to obtain the terrain separately and images separately. Using TransDem, you combine the terrain with the images and export the route which has both the terrain and the map images either as a texture or as UTM tiles.
 
I think this is the source I used for UK elevation data (the DEM - digital elevation model) https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/f0db0249-f17b-4036-9e65-309148c97ce4/national-lidar-programme
It is only for England if I recall correctly but for the south Pennines then that should be no problem. You can use various sources for the raster map image or aerial photography. Open Street Map or historical large scale Ordnance Survey mapping. If you use Transdem then these imagery sources are built in but you will need to download the DEM data from Defra.

Hope this helps

Kind regards,

Gary
 
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