Any Mega Routes?

Interesting thread, though part of me wants to question your use of "Mainline" at times. To me a Mainline is any track laid to get from Point A to B with at least a preference for keep it clear for regular traffic..... EK3 has a Mainline for instance, you can just see most of the ends of it.....

It kind of feels like you're looking for essentially unadulterated PTP (Point to Point) Train Driving (For lack of a better description?)? Presumably with hours worth of Drive time or something?

I would agree that unfortunately there isn't much more then what you've listed at this point currently available, to the best of my knowledge certainly.....

As for East Coast stuff, outside of the NEC attempts made by a few people currently available I can't think of any seriously good eastern Seaboard routes that would qualify for what you're looking for. The East Coast, as I understand it, is hard because of the integration of human Communities within the landscape. The reason where theres lots of either Super Barren Routes or Super Forested Routes is because its always been far easier to make 20 miles of repetitive natural scenery then it has been to make 2 miles of human scenery that doesn't make one cringe (Call it our over-familiarity with ourselves and our leavings). Not that it can't be done, but remember to do a mega route its gonna have to include cities, so once you do those 2 miles, you get to do another 2 miles, and another 2 miles.... Pretty soon you're thinking fondly of that 60 Miles of Scrubland, or Forest, or Desert, you just did to get out here to this cotton-pickin' city.....

I'll keep an eye on this thread anyway though. I did learn of a couple routes I either hadn't, or had forgotten about at least.

-Falcus
 
Falcus said:
Interesting thread, though part of me wants to question your use of "Mainline" at times. To me a Mainline is any track laid to get from Point A to B with at least a preference for keep it clear for regular traffic..... EK3 has a Mainline for instance, you can just see most of the ends of it.....

It kind of feels like you're looking for essentially unadulterated PTP (Point to Point) Train Driving (For lack of a better description?)? Presumably with hours worth of Drive time or something?

I would agree that unfortunately there isn't much more then what you've listed at this point currently available, to the best of my knowledge certainly.....

As for East Coast stuff, outside of the NEC attempts made by a few people currently available I can't think of any seriously good eastern Seaboard routes that would qualify for what you're looking for. The East Coast, as I understand it, is hard because of the integration of human Communities within the landscape. The reason where theres lots of either Super Barren Routes or Super Forested Routes is because its always been far easier to make 20 miles of repetitive natural scenery then it has been to make 2 miles of human scenery that doesn't make one cringe (Call it our over-familiarity with ourselves and our leavings). Not that it can't be done, but remember to do a mega route its gonna have to include cities, so once you do those 2 miles, you get to do another 2 miles, and another 2 miles.... Pretty soon you're thinking fondly of that 60 Miles of Scrubland, or Forest, or Desert, you just did to get out here to this cotton-pickin' city.....

I'll keep an eye on this thread anyway though. I did learn of a couple routes I either hadn't, or had forgotten about at least.

-Falcus
Click to expand...


Well for the Eastern seaboard based routes, I'm looking for a mega route that has to do with modern day Norfolk Southern besides the Pittsburgh Sub (WIP by Scratchy). Your forest/desert route you're talking about has already has been done many times, such as the BNSF Clovis Sub, Marias Pass, and Sherman Hill. As for British/European routes, I'm trying to look for mainly something that's somewhat NEC style, and have similar operation to that of the NEC. For example, a fully electrified mainline built through several modern European cities with traffic that ranges from high speed rail to commuter and freight trains. One reason why I'm asking for mega routes because of Dovetail Games (creator of Train Simulator 2016/Railworks) are now constantly rolling out routes (including many German ones) which have players drive long distances. That's nice, but I don't really want to spend on that game and its expensive add-ons.
 
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Well, I would suggest that if you like what you see in Dovetail game's products, if you want those bad enough, your two options are to buy them, or recreate them yourself for yourself. Anything you find for Trainz will be different in a lot of at least small ways and probably some major ones..... I do agree they are expensive. So is Run8. MSTS and OR are free, but lacking in other areas.... Hence here we are....

The only American Fully Electric Line I know of for Trainz is TUME's Avery-Drexel (As for non-Trolley/Tractions operations anyway).

As for EU stuff, I could suggest starting by doing a google search for "Trainz Polish" or "Trainz Russian" (Bear with me), and starting from there. At one point I spent about 3 months just hunting Russian/Polish Assets.... Everytime I would find one I would need It would INVARIABLY come with 10-1000 other assets, many of which were either parts to something else or other things that needed more parts I didn't have..... And all of it for free. I think I ended up with like 14+ Russian/Polish/German Routes, tens of dozens of locomotives (Steam/Diesel/Electric), and easily hundreds of cars. Many of which I still have in my TS12 install, in varying stages of Completeness for missing assets, lol. And of them, MANY of these assets were outstanding, easily on JR Level. Wearsprada made quite a few for instance before he moved to JR to make SD-9s Ironically enough, amongst a few other super talented Russian (I think?) Content creators.

After that I did think of another route to add to your list. TrainzItalia's Donner Pass. Its payware (And a bit steep too at that IIRC), and IDK what its Status for T:ANE is, but its generally regarded as one of the best routes currently available for Trainz. You should also check out their WPY (White Pass and Yukon), though its Narrowgauge, hence operations on it are a bit different (Mostly read "slower), then say American Class I's.

Edited to add: For more EU stuff you could also start with Okihu's (Sp) "Trainz Premium Routes". He has a website around somewhere and regularly posts updates on this site about his work.

-Falcus
 
Wow!

I do have Avery-Drexel in T:ANE and I do like it better than the original version from Trainz 2010. On Trainz Premium Routes, most of the routes are Romanian and they're pretty nice. The thing is that I'm usually not familiar with names of most Eastern European cities. So what are the German and Russian routes do you have?
 
I don't quite know what you want for long distances, but the EK3 is about 25 miles long almost end-to-end. There are some other branches as well such as the Tilford mines branch on the Beechwood sub, and the Chadds Ford branch out of Jeff.

The route may seem compact, but there's a lot going on. I use it as a through route from just outside of Cornettsville through past Typo and beyond with other traffic feeding in from Tilford and Chadds Ford. This makes for some busy traffic which means meets, sidings, and yard switching. Combine that with the Ozark Valley, and that's now over 100 miles long and that alone can take a good amount of time. This would make a route, though not electrified, similar to one such as the old L&N, or even NS as it goes from the mid-South through to the Great Plains which I is my intention.

Now there are some things to take into consideration with such a route as this. The number of assets on a route this size can and will bring a computer to its melting point even with TS12, it's quite a hog and even T:ANE has issues with it. If you want anything like the East Coast routes, this will be worse because there are even more things than trees with the hundreds of houses, buildings mills, and so on that dot the landscape. This doesn't count the various freight yards and terminals you are going to encounter. Are you going to keep them all empty, or are you going to run some local switching? Having miles upon miles of empty track with nothing else going on is boring.

This brings up another point. The shear number of consists needed to make anything interesting takes hours to setup, and configuring all the track marks can take days. Yes, I sat there with a spreadsheet and marked out each and every track mark then divided them into divisions and subs. Once I had that done, I then setup each division as a schedule in the Schedule Library. Even with this setup, I still had problems as I would link up the wrong track mark, or connect the wrong schedules. This took me another week of fiddling in my spare time because I was working still to working on this route.

Having this large number of AI drivers too causes Trainz, any version, to have apoplexy and the AI get stupid. They can ruin any small route if they act up, and on something this big it gets worse, especially if you are at the other end and find that things are getting a bit wonky and stuttering badly. You start checking consists and find that there's one backing up and going forward as it's now missed a track mark, because it can, so now everyone else is waiting in queue to go forward. Once you free up these drivers, another will start up elsewhere. In the end you end up firing all the drivers and deleting the consists, or quitting out of frustration.

The other thing too is the driving of very, very, long routes is quite tiring at least for me. I find myself nodding off and try my best to stay awake. Having the other traffic, towns, junctions, and so on keep the interest up, especially when things work as they should.

Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you. If this is what you want, go for it, but keep these things in mind.
 
JCitron said:
I don't quite know what you want for long distances, but the EK3 is about 25 miles long almost end-to-end. There are some other branches as well such as the Tilford mines branch on the Beechwood sub, and the Chadds Ford branch out of Jeff.

The route may seem compact, but there's a lot going on. I use it as a through route from just outside of Cornettsville through past Typo and beyond with other traffic feeding in from Tilford and Chadds Ford. This makes for some busy traffic which means meets, sidings, and yard switching. Combine that with the Ozark Valley, and that's now over 100 miles long and that alone can take a good amount of time. This would make a route, though not electrified, similar to one such as the old L&N, or even NS as it goes from the mid-South through to the Great Plains which I is my intention.

Now there are some things to take into consideration with such a route as this. The number of assets on a route this size can and will bring a computer to its melting point even with TS12, it's quite a hog and even T:ANE has issues with it. If you want anything like the East Coast routes, this will be worse because there are even more things than trees with the hundreds of houses, buildings mills, and so on that dot the landscape. This doesn't count the various freight yards and terminals you are going to encounter. Are you going to keep them all empty, or are you going to run some local switching? Having miles upon miles of empty track with nothing else going on is boring.

This brings up another point. The shear number of consists needed to make anything interesting takes hours to setup, and configuring all the track marks can take days. Yes, I sat there with a spreadsheet and marked out each and every track mark then divided them into divisions and subs. Once I had that done, I then setup each division as a schedule in the Schedule Library. Even with this setup, I still had problems as I would link up the wrong track mark, or connect the wrong schedules. This took me another week of fiddling in my spare time because I was working still to working on this route.

Having this large number of AI drivers too causes Trainz, any version, to have apoplexy and the AI get stupid. They can ruin any small route if they act up, and on something this big it gets worse, especially if you are at the other end and find that things are getting a bit wonky and stuttering badly. You start checking consists and find that there's one backing up and going forward as it's now missed a track mark, because it can, so now everyone else is waiting in queue to go forward. Once you free up these drivers, another will start up elsewhere. In the end you end up firing all the drivers and deleting the consists, or quitting out of frustration.

The other thing too is the driving of very, very, long routes is quite tiring at least for me. I find myself nodding off and try my best to stay awake. Having the other traffic, towns, junctions, and so on keep the interest up, especially when things work as they should.

Anyway, I'm not trying to discourage you. If this is what you want, go for it, but keep these things in mind.
Click to expand...



Thanks! I had very similar experiences as you, especially with the misbehaving AI traffic when I tried making sessions on some routes. For the AI train which just run through the route, I just had them run on Autopilot mode while I have issues with other AI trains that run either on passenger schedules or local yard transfer runs.
 
BAM: Udokan -Kodar from railroadsim.net is almost 400km of mainline in Russia. Bouilt for TRS2010 but will work in TANE. Forgot about that one 😀
Graeme.
 
I have a suggestion for a mega route: Heartbeat Revisited. It depicts the railways of the North Yorkshire coast in the late 40s and 50s before most of the network was closed in 1958. Here's a map with annotations:
556b22cd832532283d6ab8f08ec22f06.jpg

Of course, being set in the fifties means it's out of the time period, but of course IMO the steam era was more fun. ;) Not sure if it classifies as a main line either, TBH. But it's big.
Here's a screenshot, taken at Staithes Viaduct:
000397d492ee114be1577e43333e275c.jpg

BTW I have been to most of the places this route depicts and most of it is pretty much spot on- Pickering, Grosmont, Goathland and the stations north of Whitby are the standouts. Scarborough looks nothing like the real Scarborough, same for Middlesbrough, but they're massive towns (cities?) so I can forgive.
 
nathanmallard said:
I have a suggestion for a mega route: Heartbeat Revisited. It depicts the railways of the North Yorkshire coast in the late 40s and 50s before most of the network was closed in 1958. Here's a map with annotations:
556b22cd832532283d6ab8f08ec22f06.jpg

Of course, being set in the fifties means it's out of the time period, but of course IMO the steam era was more fun. ;) Not sure if it classifies as a main line either, TBH. But it's big.
Here's a screenshot, taken at Staithes Viaduct:
000397d492ee114be1577e43333e275c.jpg

BTW I have been to most of the places this route depicts and most of it is pretty much spot on- Pickering, Grosmont, Goathland and the stations north of Whitby are the standouts. Scarborough looks nothing like the real Scarborough, same for Middlesbrough, but they're massive towns (cities?) so I can forgive.
Click to expand...

Nice! Would that be ex-LNER?
 
Yup. Suitable locomotives would be LNERlover5's Thompson L1s (As seen in the shot), Trainboi's K3, V2 and 4MT, skipper1945's J94 and cmburgess's J72 (all on the DLS). Other suitable locomotives are available as payware, such as PaulHobb's Black 5, J15 and J50 (the Black 5 comes with S&C, the other two are on his website). There are several versions of the route on the DLS, the one I have is Heartbeat Revisited 2. Beware, they are automatic derailers on it that use invisble track which really need to be removed before you run it. Also, my copy of the route has been modified- I have replaced the built-in SpeedTrees with more frame rate friendly equivalents, and I have replaced some of the "Carz" with vehicles from the S&C pack to make it look more period.
 
Falcus said:
Interesting thread, though part of me wants to question your use of "Mainline" at times. To me a Mainline is any track laid to get from Point A to B with at least a preference for keep it clear for regular traffic..... EK3 has a Mainline for instance, you can just see most of the ends of it.....

It kind of feels like you're looking for essentially unadulterated PTP (Point to Point) Train Driving (For lack of a better description?)? Presumably with hours worth of Drive time or something?

I would agree that unfortunately there isn't much more then what you've listed at this point currently available, to the best of my knowledge certainly.....

As for East Coast stuff, outside of the NEC attempts made by a few people currently available I can't think of any seriously good eastern Seaboard routes that would qualify for what you're looking for. The East Coast, as I understand it, is hard because of the integration of human Communities within the landscape. The reason where theres lots of either Super Barren Routes or Super Forested Routes is because its always been far easier to make 20 miles of repetitive natural scenery then it has been to make 2 miles of human scenery that doesn't make one cringe (Call it our over-familiarity with ourselves and our leavings). Not that it can't be done, but remember to do a mega route its gonna have to include cities, so once you do those 2 miles, you get to do another 2 miles, and another 2 miles.... Pretty soon you're thinking fondly of that 60 Miles of Scrubland, or Forest, or Desert, you just did to get out here to this cotton-pickin' city.....

I'll keep an eye on this thread anyway though. I did learn of a couple routes I either hadn't, or had forgotten about at least.

-Falcus
Click to expand...

This post is spot-on! There is always a trade-off between detail and performance. Any route-builder will tell you they've found this out the hard way. You come up with an area that you're super-proud of, because it's so detailed and looks just awesome, and then you try to drive it only to find your FPS is in the toilet. I enjoy the longer routes as well - trying to make a route have a purpose, as opposed to just loading a boxcar, and delivering it 2 miles down the line - not very plausible. My route has over 500km of mainline track and allows for longer deliveries as well as shorter ones. I understand the shorter deliveries may not make as much sense in the real world, but I've had some people complain that you have to drive too far on my route, and then other people say you don't have to drive far enough. I've elected to do long areas of "wilderness" in between destinations, simply because it's just more efficient to build. I've been working on my route for over 12 years now - and the thing I've learned is that you can't please everyone. To Trainmaster189 - I understand what you're looking for, but I think you'll be hard-pressed to find it exactly, simply due to the sheer amount of work required to create it. I tried to do something prototypical many years ago (Toronto Lakeshore West), which is a lot of urban and cityscapes, and I was pretty much fried by the time I was done - and that was only about 50km!! Anyway, I know I'm rambling here a bit, but maybe try your hand at building some routes or areas (if you haven't already) which would be pleasing to you - I get the same amount of enjoyment from creating as I do from driving. I hope you find what you're looking for!
 
neilsmith749 said:
This post is spot-on! There is always a trade-off between detail and performance. Any route-builder will tell you they've found this out the hard way. You come up with an area that you're super-proud of, because it's so detailed and looks just awesome, and then you try to drive it only to find your FPS is in the toilet.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your endorsement. I agree with alot of what you say as well. I will posit however that, to date, T:ANE is perhaps the single most able sim I have yet found to do Large Scale High Detail Simulation.... If I could take Poly Counts of some parts of my route for Scenery, and then show the performance I get driving JR/K&L Trains through them, I think people would start to see that, for all its quirk's and other problems (Of which there is no denying there are), T:ANE is to date one of the most incredible pieces of Simulation Software to ever be released. As such, my point is that I feel like I could actually model more of Seattle, as accurately as my Conscience demands, in T:ANE and still accomplish decent performance.

The Trade off now however (Instead of the Poly Count Driven "Performance <-> Detail"), seems to be becoming more and more the Sheer amount of time involved in *making* High Detailed Routes..... MANY of the route creators here for Trainz are single individuals, that for whatever our reasons (pretty much exclusively some form of self-interest), have decided to try our hand at plinking assets down. My route, Based around Seattle WA, has a few areas that are just starting to come together and look pretty outstanding. Its taken me 2 years (In college mind, but even if I wasn't I question my ability to have done a whole lot more then I have, maybe, maybe not) and over 2600 assets. End result to date? Maybe 4.5 Minutes of Prototype Immersive Ready to Roll simulation @ prototype speed, and tons of areas where that are somewhere between "Yea, I've been there" to "If only I had all the assets I needed to finish this!" where much of the Trainzing Public would sit back and say "HA-HA~! I see Grid!"......

In summary, Modeling accurate real world routes, notably any urban areas (Though to a lesser extent even Rural or Wilderness/barren routes as well with what we have available now for detail assets), is getting to be too big a job for a single person. Theres just too much stuff for one person to find (Meaning familiarize yourself with suitable assets and ultimately pick one), and place (put onto the map in a way that makes sense for the scene and accomplish some modicum of authenticity towards the actual place)......

I wonder at the future of Google's (And others) 3D mapping technology to be able to just instantly poof real world areas into existence for simulation.... I just hope their continued expansion into this area doesn't go the way of the Google Car's (Extinct).

Food for thought.....
-Falcus
 
Agreed - TANE isn't perfect, but IMHO, it's leaps and bounds above previous versions. So far, I'm very happy with it, and urge others to take the leap. It's the closest it's ever been to what I have hoped to see out of this franchise - and hopefully it'll only get better as more and more of the bugs are worked out. As I said, it's not necessarily perfect, but I'm liking the direction it's headed!
 
Thanks! I've tried building some routes (mainly American and German) before I accidentally deleted them while switching over to T:ANE. I'm planning to make some routes again, but I do get stuck on certain things such as AI traffic, prototypical signal placement (only on German routes), and coming up with unique names for cities along the route without using ones already used in real life. For the German routes, I've been wanting to imitate some of the real life mainlines which link the urban areas with suburbs in between while also try to make a fictional version of a high speed ICE line and probably merge them. For the American routes, I'm still planning to run a fictional eastern Class 2 railroad that interchanges and even have trackage rights with two class 1's (NS & CSX).

As for what you said about more remote areas between cities, I will might try to make a fictional Austrian route since they have more scenery than cities like in many parts of Germany. For an ideal American route, I feel like the wilderness routes based in US and Canada are already have been used a lot and I'm generally a fan of eastern railroads, so I'm not sure how many remote areas there are in the northeast and in the south.
 
Falcus said:
Thank you for your endorsement. I agree with alot of what you say as well. I will posit however that, to date, T:ANE is perhaps the single most able sim I have yet found to do Large Scale High Detail Simulation.... If I could take Poly Counts of some parts of my route for Scenery, and then show the performance I get driving JR/K&L Trains through them, I think people would start to see that, for all its quirk's and other problems (Of which there is no denying there are), T:ANE is to date one of the most incredible pieces of Simulation Software to ever be released. As such, my point is that I feel like I could actually model more of Seattle, as accurately as my Conscience demands, in T:ANE and still accomplish decent performance.

The Trade off now however (Instead of the Poly Count Driven "Performance <-> Detail"), seems to be becoming more and more the Sheer amount of time involved in *making* High Detailed Routes..... MANY of the route creators here for Trainz are single individuals, that for whatever our reasons (pretty much exclusively some form of self-interest), have decided to try our hand at plinking assets down. My route, Based around Seattle WA, has a few areas that are just starting to come together and look pretty outstanding. Its taken me 2 years (In college mind, but even if I wasn't I question my ability to have done a whole lot more then I have, maybe, maybe not) and over 2600 assets. End result to date? Maybe 4.5 Minutes of Prototype Immersive Ready to Roll simulation @ prototype speed, and tons of areas where that are somewhere between "Yea, I've been there" to "If only I had all the assets I needed to finish this!" where much of the Trainzing Public would sit back and say "HA-HA~! I see Grid!"......

In summary, Modeling accurate real world routes, notably any urban areas (Though to a lesser extent even Rural or Wilderness/barren routes as well with what we have available now for detail assets), is getting to be too big a job for a single person. Theres just too much stuff for one person to find (Meaning familiarize yourself with suitable assets and ultimately pick one), and place (put onto the map in a way that makes sense for the scene and accomplish some modicum of authenticity towards the actual place)......

I wonder at the future of Google's (And others) 3D mapping technology to be able to just instantly poof real world areas into existence for simulation.... I just hope their continued expansion into this area doesn't go the way of the Google Car's (Extinct).

Food for thought.....
-Falcus
Click to expand...


I agree with you on this, especially accurate placement of tracks and signals. The only way I learn this is from observing Google maps and watching real life cab ride videos on YouTube which can be hard to remember though.
 
Neil,

I too enjoy your UMR routes and have used them since the earliest releases. :)

Spot on about T:ANE. It is by far the best for this, bugs and all which I'm finding now are more apparent on large-sized routes, and is something I have a thread going on the Quick Drive Rule issue which Tony and Co. are taking an interest in. With my 450 km or more-sized route with 47 drivers, at least, not counting other consists, I have brought T:ANE to its knees! This is definitely something to consider when building large routes. Thinking back on this, even TS12 would have fits after a bunch of drivers were spat out of the portals as the sim would get slower and slower while driving along to a point where the AI would completely revolt and walk out of their jobs.

That said, what we don't want is a 450km route with no opposing traffic. That will make for one boring drive even with all the pretty scenery as we ride along. There has to be support for larger numbers of drivers and activity and hopefully my findings will push the envelope even further. I have that tendency to make systems glow and crash, especially when we're on the bleeding edge of the software we're using.

John
 
celje said:
What's about EUtogether route?
Click to expand...

I was going to download it, but I took your latest DBTogether route instead because I'm not a big fan of Polish content. It's a nice route, for me it doesn't look like it's made for fast ICE and InterCity trains because it's mostly branchline/shortline after shortline. I was going to suggest you to make another version of DBTogether, but with the "double track" mainline sections of the merged routes which I think would be nice.
 
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