Now that Taito's Densha de Go and the even older Tomy SL-de-Ikou are largely history, it would be nice to reproduce some of our favourite routes in Trainz - mine probably being the Morioka to Omagari "mini" Shinkansen across the mountains. However there are a few handicaps to producing Japanese routes, the most obvious being how Trainz handles tunnels. Many Japanese routes have alot of tunnels and snowsheds. The spline type with limited positoning don't really cut it and the dighole method only really works in certain situations, i.e. shallow tunnels or where the entrance matches the vertex being blanked.
In terms of mapping it can be a challenge, thinking of Transdem overlays, Open Street Map doesn't show where the tunnels are and Google Maps don't have much information on them. There is an unofficial overlay for Google Earth which displays a topographic map but I haven't been able to figure any easy way of getting this into Transdem other than taking screen dumps, stitching together in PSP and manually georeferencing.
However I will continue working on ideas in between my other projects.