Annie's Virtual Pre-Grouping, Grouping and BR Layouts & Workbench

[Tom Burnham]

9 hours ago, Caley Jim said:

At least they're forming an orderly queue!

 

Jim

Hmm, looks as if the pachyderms had been riding in horse boxes. I seem to recall it's been mentioned before, but Southern Region appendices to carriage working notices identified utility vans with floors strengthened for transport of elephants. What comes of being a Common Carrier I suppose - you have to be prepared to carry uncommon items.

Edited December 17, 2021 by Tom Burnham
Typo corrected

[Regularity]

13 hours ago, Annie said:

Morning cheer up picture:  "Tickets please".

 

 

 

“The luggage is in the trunk…”

[DonB]

The GROAN button is still not available!

[Regularity]

I am trying my hardest to create sufficient demand for it.

[Northroader]

The interesting bit will be when they cross the footbridge.

[Annie]

Running round at Balessie.  Now that I've largely completed the repairs and fixes my mid-19th century engines needed to run properly in TRS22 I'm having a lot of fun playing trains with them again.  

 

[rocor]

Upon the contiguity of elephants and railways.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Attribution:

Keith Edkins, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Edited December 18, 2021 by rocor
Problems with original image.

[Regularity]

There’s always “Camel” (after the river) on the B&W, plus “Elephant” (after a misunderstanding.)

[Annie]

 

One of the problems I've had with my older locomotives is that the Trainz physics engine has been significantly updated in TRS22 and while this is a good thing in many ways it meant that most of my mid-19th century locomotives from TS2004 had their engine specs go completely daft with their driving wheels rotating too fast and wildly out of synch with their sound files.  With their outside cranks my Hawthornes were particularly badly affected and instead of the cranks rotating with their usual slow beat they were whizzing around no matter what speed the locomotive was doing.  The usual fix is to find a more recent engine spec, but with my mid-19th century engines I needed one that wasn't overpowered and I also needed one that had weedy brakes. 

I was prepared to write an engine spec if I had to, but in the end I found that an engine spec intended for a N.E.R. Class H (Y7) was just about perfect.  That might sound odd, but the thing about most engine specs for Trainz is that it is really hard to write an engine spec using prototype information and not end up with it being a wee bit on the excessively overpowered side of things.  All of which meant that the hyper Class H  engine spec was totally perfect for the majority of my old locomotives.  The brakes are nice and weedy too as I really don't like locomotives made for Trainz that do instant power stops, - and especially not locomotives that were built before the 1890s.

 

Late 1850's Hawthorne 0-6-0 leaving Cairnrigg and about to tackle to stiff climb up to Rostyre.

 

 

Hanging off the cab side sheet with my Box Brownie in one hand.

 

Edited December 17, 2021 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Edwardian]

All this is like travelling round Mike Sharman's old layout.  Marvellous.

[Annie]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

All this is like travelling round Mike Sharman's old layout.  Marvellous.

Mike Sharman's amazing layout was definitely an influence for me James.  I have an online RM subscription and recently older issues going back into the 1960s have become available to read in digital form.  Perhaps I should do a nostalgia trip and look up all Mike Sharman's old articles.

[DonB]

18 hours ago, rocor said:

Upon the contiguity of elephants and railways.

 

 

How do i get to reveal this picture? I just get a tiny thumbnail in the centre of a blank screen.

Must be possible, rocor's post got 3 "likes" quite quickly. Please make allowance for age-induced stupidity.

[rocor]

2 hours ago, DonB said:

 

How do i get to reveal this picture? I just get a tiny thumbnail in the centre of a blank screen.

Must be possible, rocor's post got 3 "likes" quite quickly. Please make allowance for age-induced stupidity.

 

Problem with original link. New image of elephant substituted.

[Caley Jim]

5 hours ago, DonB said:

 

How do i get to reveal this picture? I just get a tiny thumbnail in the centre of a blank screen.

Must be possible, rocor's post got 3 "likes" quite quickly. Please make allowance for age-induced stupidity.

I had the same problem and also with photos on a thread in the 2mm Finescale section.

 

Jim

[rocor]

3 minutes ago, Caley Jim said:

I had the same problem and also with photos on a thread in the 2mm Finescale section.

 

Jim

 

I can honestly say that one was never down to me. I have never ventured into the 2mm Finescale section (I have less than optimal eyesight).

[Annie]

E&GR Longridge 0-6-0 of 1848. - though my one has been updated a little with sheet metal boiler cladding and self contained buffers.

A lovely old engine that's a real favourite.

 

 

E&GR Hurst 0-4-2 shunting in Cairnrigg yard.  These William Hurst designed engines were 0-4-2 single-framed well tanks with 12 in by 18 in inside cylinders, 4 ft 9 in coupled wheels, and 3 ft 6 in trailing wheels.  From what I've been able to glean there were 15 altogether, though with some variations as to wheel diameter, wheelbase & etc.  They were intended for use on branchlines and working short trains; - which is essentially what I use them for.  They run very sweetly too under the new Trainz physics engine.

 

 

[Annie]

Morning LNWR cheer up picture:  No.3049 on the Cromford & High Peak.  I know you've seen this picture before, but you'll have to put up with it because I like it.  With all the celebration of the Premier Line that's going on at the moment I thought a change of theme was appropriate.

 

[Compound2632]

Nice Midland ex-private owner wagon there.

 

I've said that before too.

[Annie]

Nothing wrong with mentioning it again Stephen  

[Annie]

Evening cheer up picture:  Bing 'George the Fifth'.  Clockwork of course.  Long ago when I was a wee tot Mum took me to visit an elderly friend and I was trusted to play with one of these.  There was an of oval track, a signal and two beautiful LNWR bogie coaches as well and it was all laid out on the floor for me.  I can still quite vividly remember that.  I can still remember feeling very disappointed as well that the engine didn't stop when I operated the signal, so even then I understood about proper railways and how they worked.  None of that 'choo-choo' train baby talk nonsense for this kid.

 

[Compound2632]

35 minutes ago, Annie said:

Evening cheer up picture:  Bing 'George the Fifth'. 

 

RTR isn't what it was. These days it's dominated by the latest traction - ugly brutes mostly.

 

Oh hang on - when did the Bing George come out? 1912?

[Annie]

Yes indeed RTR isn't what it used to be alright.  As a small child who owned a clockwork Hornby M1 passenger set the Bing 'George the Fifth' was downright impressive and I could immediately see that was modelled on a proper engine even if it didn't look like the huge black NZGR 'J' and 'Ja' class engines I was more familiar with from travelling on the train with Mum.

[Caley Jim]

48 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

RTR isn't what it was. 

Oh! I don't know about that.! Rails of Sheffield have seen the light and just released their CR 812 class in a variety of versions.  Wrong scale for me, unfortunately! 

 

Jim

[Annie]

11 hours ago, Caley Jim said:

CR 812 class

And a very nice class of locomotive they are too Jim.  I've got a digital one by Darlington Works that I must blow the virtual dust off sometime soon.

 

I found my Darlington Works N.E.R. Class 'O' engines and they've been added to the North Eastern Railway session for 'Cairnrigg to Balessie'.  'C to B' wasn't intended to be a N.E.R. layout, but I don't have anywhere else I can run my sad little collection of N.E.R. engines and rolling stock and they've been neglected for far too long.

 

 

It turned out that I didn't need to spend quite as much on house repairs as I thought so my little Christmas treat to myself was buying a N.E.R. 'Shildon' 8 ton brake van and some diagram B1 dropside wagons from Paul of Paulz Trainz.  I ordered the clean versions, but Paul threw in the weathered versions as well which was very nice of him.

 

 

And look at those tarpaulin/wagon sheets!  - and they have ropes too.  These would be about the best tarpaulin/wagon sheets that I've seen modelled for Trainz.  I made some fairly basic ones that turned out reasonably well, but I could never manage to create those kind of shapes.

 

 

 

[Annie]

Work continues with updating my collection of NER rolling stock to work properly in TRS22.

At the rate I'm going the NER section is going to have a fairly minimal selection of coaches that are ready for service.  The coach windows were almost opaque in TRS22 which meant that I had to adjust the opacity setting for the coach body mesh (3 levels of LOD) and then for each individual door mesh.  The driving trailer is one of the most recent bogie clerestory coaches from Paulz Trainz so it only needed its windows doing, but other older NER clerestories needed the main body colours adjusting as well as the windows.  Fortunately I'd already fixed the body colours on the six wheelers since they'd seen more use on an earlier layout, but they still needed their windows adjusting.

 

 

This Tranship Van is one of Paul's older models and I've reworked its main body textures in an effort to improve its appearance.  I had to redo all the lettering as the original mesh texture patches were low resolution and didn't look all that good.  Reworking lettering on small individual texture patches that may or may not be stretched or compressed in size on the model is not my idea of fun.

The smaller NER van next to it is one of my own hand drawn and shaded efforts which I made originally for TS2012 and I can't help thinking that my old fashioned methods look better than the larger van with all its fully modelled 3D details.

 

 

The rest of my Christmas present to myself.  A pair of Fletcher Class 124 (J76) tank engines as rebuilt by Worsdell.  Being Fletcher engines this pair differ from one another in all manner of details.  Being a small class of 12 engines having two is a bit of an indulgence, but I didn't want a Class 290 or an 'E' or 'E1' which apart from anything else are older models in Paul's catalogue and are well overdue for updating.  Being Westinghouse and steam heat fitted this pair will be useful engines and able to undertake most jobs on the section as I only really want to have the Classes 'O', '1463', '59' and '124' on the layout.  I want to do some work on the Fletcher 'BTP' before bringing it back; - and I'm going to invoke Rule 1 to have my Bouch 4-4-0's putting in an appearance from time to time even though they would have been long gone by the 1890's time period that I'm trying to stick to.