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

[Annie]

I took some snaps while I was wandering around the layout checking things.

 

Tenpenny Wharf.

 

Tramway bridge over the salt marsh.

 

Windweather harbour.

 

Lighthouse Spit.

 

Winkle bay.

 

Old Mill Lane.

[Hroth]

Old Mill Lane would make a splendid picture postcard!

 

Meanwhile the caption for Winkle Bay might be - "We'll put the Sprat and Winkle hut just here".....

 

[MikeOxon]

Those desolate beach scenes reminded me of the wonderful model: "Little Point"

[Regularity]

I prefer Steve Cook’s “Dungeness Siding” in 1:32 scale:

[Annie]

All the coastal scenes are on the Windweather Tramway loop which follows a good deal of empty coastline before turning inland to cross miles of fen land.  There were some hopes to promote Winkle Bay as a rival to Hopewood on Sea, but one glance at the snap I took of the beach will give you a very good idea as to why that came to nothing. 

It's goods traffic from the harbours at Windweather and Tenpenny as well as seasonal agricultural traffic that pays the bills on the Windweather Tramway.  During Summer there is a slightly increased passenger traffic, but nothing like the Summer passenger traffic handled by the Hopewood Tramway due to it's more attractive beaches and coastline.

 

Old Mill Lane is to the north east(ish) of Hopewood on Sea about a quarter of a mile up the road just past the junction where the Hopewood Tramway heads inland to its terminus at Elgar Wood.  Just past the old Mill there are a couple of big farms (which I haven't completed yet) which are served by a siding (or two) leading off the tramway.

 

The small station at Winkle Bay.  The station building which I retextured for the line is  what the Windweather Tramway regards as being their standard station building.  I don't think any noted architects were involved at the design stage.  Please note the presence of a certain well known poster on the wall beside the ticket window.

Edited December 2, 2019 by Annie
more to say and added a picture

[Annie]

An ex-Hopewood Tramway 2-2-2 tank engine.  The Hopewood Tramway acquired three of these engines to handle their heavy Summertime passenger traffic but the BOT had a fit when they found out and they were ordered off the line.  They can now be found at work on the Windweather Tramway where their ability to chase the horizon while being economical on coal has made them a firm favourite with the tramway's owners.

The Windweather Tramway is more a light railway than a tramway and has almost no roadside trackwork to speak of so after a small amount of grumbling the BOT agreed to their use.

 

 

Constructed from all manner of bits that weren't supposed to fit together I created these engines to do the particular job of working the very long Windweather loop line.  There's been quite a lot of development in getting them to run well and tested against other small tank engines including a 'Terrier' the ex-Hopewood single driver tank engines won out every time.  These single driver tank engines are very economic on coal while still being quick to get away from station stops and get up to speed.

And I'm not joking about coal.  If an digital engine runs out of coal (and/or water) it will stop if it's running on the 'advanced steam controls', - and while it will keep going on the DCC controls it will stop producing steam and smoke effects.  I like to run my tramways properly, so I take note of these things. 

 

I've just changed the sound file on these engines since the original became garbled at low speed and sounded odd.  The new one is for two cylinder engine with Stephenson's valve gear, - only the engine used to make the recording was larger than my tank engines, - so while it's a nice sound file my small engines are presently going around with big bass voices.  I did make a short video clip, but I don't want to bore you with it unless you really want to hear it

So I'm on the hunt for a new sound file (sigh).

[Hroth]

3 hours ago, Regularity said:

I prefer Steve Cook’s “Dungeness Siding” in 1:32 scale:

 

Wonderfully bleak!

 

[Regularity]

When Steve was building it, he mentioned that he was going to add sound (distant waves on pebbles, a light breeze), and I jokingly asked if he was going to add smell, as smell is the most effective stimulant for memories - thinking at the time that this would not be possible.

Well, Steve is very ingenious and manged to find a way of generating the smell of see weed, and coupled it up to a fan which would sporadically blow this across the scene.

I have since learned to keep my gob shut: it seems he manages the difficult immediately, and the impossible after a bit of thought and application.

[Annie]

A short clip of No.7 running on the Eastlingwold & Great Mulling's line to Oakmarket.  The E&GR is at a higher level above the fen country that the Windweather Tramway has claimed for its own so about halfway through the clip you'll hear No.7 begin climbing the gradient.  No.7 slips slightly a couple of times as well.  Speed was around 30mph and according to Trainz the train weight was 80 tons.

Plainly the sound file isn't the right one for my 2-2-2 tank engines, but it does work well for my larger Beyer Peacock single driver tender engines.

 

 

[Annie]

E&GR Beyer Peacock No.3 approaching the station at Hayward on the old Barrowhills & Foxhollow Extension Railway line with a southbound train for Moxbury.

 

[MikeOxon]

27 minutes ago, Annie said:

E&GR Beyer Peacock No.3 approaching the station at Hayward on the old Barrowhills & Foxhollow Extension Railway line with a southbound train for Moxbury.

A nice engine and good to see upholstery inside the carriages.

[Annie]

Those Beyer Peacock singles are one of my favourites Mike.  Like most of the engines on my Norfolk layout they've been much fettled and modded and they run very nicely.  Edit:  Originally the Beyer Peacocks produced very black smoke and just recently I successfully edited their config file to change the colour of the smoke so I'll be doing the same to my 'Bogie' class 4-4-0ST's.

The teak E&GR 6 wheel carriages are actually NER 6 wheelers that I retextured with a slightly darker teak finish than LNER teak and then lettered up for the E&GR; - and yes their interior compartments are nicely fitted out.

Edited December 2, 2019 by Annie
More information

[Annie]

After being left in my digital trainset box for far too long I got my Eastlingwold & Great Mulling Rly rebuilt Beyer Peacock ''Sebastapol' out for a run about on the layout.

The first three coaches are some West Norfolk Railway coaches I put together to run on the layout.  The third coach isn't finished yet, but I thought it good enough to include in the rake so i could take some snaps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a nice cheer up after a rotten day with sleepiness was completing this teak luggage composite I started ages ago.  I seem to have a thing about making teak coaches and I don't know why since creating the artwork for them is a lot of work.  I might make some more so I can have a complete rake of matching  six wheelers, but not today, - definitely not today.

 

 

 

Edited December 3, 2019 by Annie
more to say and added a picture

[MikeOxon]

it's easy to see why some railways clung on the single-wheelers for as long as they could.  There's a very elegant simplicity about them.

 

The light on the side of the coaches in your 7th pic is very effective, together with the misty-looking trees in the distance.  I like that one best, with the signal gantry also adding interest.

[Annie]

Yes I was really lucky with getting that snap Mike.  It's my favourite out of the set of pictures too.  I often miss a lot of good shots because my brain decides to go off line for a second or two which is frustrating at times.

 

'Sebastapol' is my only rebuilt Beyer Peacock single with the other two on the line being in 'as built' condition more or less.  I asked the chap who made the Beyer Peacock singles if he would make me a version with a cab and the later type boiler as a special request and I'm very pleased with it.

 

These single driver engines were a successful type and for an engine designed in the mid 1850s they had very long lives with some lasting up until just before WW1.  BP sold a more than a few of them in Europe as well and one that I know of went to Australia.

 

I'm a bit of a single driver enthusiast truth be told and with my Norfolk layout not having much at all in the way of gradients the Beyer Peacock singles do just fine.

[Martin S-C]

On 27/11/2019 at 09:40, Edwardian said:

 

Great to be taken on a trip along the line.  I swear I can hear the lowing of cattle! 

Your videos are great Annie but quite jerky. Is that because the game is having to render so much graphically as well as make all the physics calculations? FRAPS will tell you what frame rate you are getting and I'd be interested to know since parts of that look like they are into single figures.

 

The sounds are wonderful though.

[Annie]

Yes Martin I'm pushing things a bit in TS2012 with my layouts because they are so large and well detailed.  On the Broad Gauge layout I was getting between 5-7 fps and on my Norfolk layout around 6-8 fps.  TS2012 is only 32 bit so it can't really use any more than 4Gb of RAM and because it's a cpu intensive simulator it doesn't make much use of my graphic's card's full potential.  My computer has 8 processor cores and TS2012 can only use two of them at best.

If I was to move everything across to the later 64 bit railway sims such as TANE or TS2019 there wouldn't be any problems since they can make full use of my computer's resources.  I've been thinking about doing that for a while now, but it's the huge amount of work involved that's putting me off.

[Annie]

A quick clip of 'Sebastapol' heading westwards away from Brenton Wood.  I recorded this video entirely by accident when I pressed the wrong key on my keyboard.  Most of it was awful, but this bit was okay.

 

 

[MikeOxon]

That clip looks reasonably smooth.  I think the train sim has to manage a lot more detailed scenery than is usual in a flight simulator but I also feel that Microsoft probably had some very sophisticated techniques for improving the frame rate.  On my 64-bit machine, with quite a good graphics card,  I find T:ANE can be jerky at times unless I reduce the screen size a bit.  The software seems to take ages to cache its scenery files before starting and is very ,memory intensive.  I've not found time to try much with it, as yet.

[Annie]

Memory is a big thing in Trainz Mike.  Some assets can have huge memory hits so after a while you learn not to group certain things together if you want a decent frame rate.  Both TS2019 and TANE cache everything before start up which can take a while.  TS2012 doesn't though which can lead to pauses while running the simulator while it loads as it goes.  I have TS2012 running on a 10,000 rpm server grade hard drive with a sizeable cache and while that helps I still get annoying pauses.

 

Have a look at your video settings for TANE and check the settings aren't too high for your computer setup.  It can be worthwhile having a play with them to see what works best.  Most of the time the 'normal' settings are fine and look reasonable.

 

The spot where I took that video clip is all open fields and hedgerows so things were running reasonably smoothly.  It's around towns and their stations and station yards where framerates can take a dive.

[Annie]

 

Something I've been disappointed about was that the four GER coach models I use on Norfolk layout had a blurry greyness to them that made them look like nondescript brownish coach shaped lumps.  The coach windows were also very dark and difficult to see through.  It had got to the stage where I was avoiding using them or coupling them to my other 4 and 6 wheel coaches because they just didn't look right.

 

So putting on a fresh brave girl Tee shirt I set about fixing them.  I'd always known what the problem was, but with each coach having eight separate 3D meshes all of which would require several adjustments to the ambient, diffuse and opacity settings I'd been putting off doing anything about it.

The problem with the windows was traced to their opacity being 59% which I found really strange.  Because I always thought the idea of a window is that you could see through it.  I reset that to 15% which gave the effect of a slight film of dirt on the window's surface, - but at least now it was possible to actually see through the window!

 

And so it went on with adjusting things until it was possible to see that the coaches had a varnished wood finish and were no longer covered with a film of grey muck and I was very happy and there was much joy in the land.

Only horror awaits.  Somewhere something went wrong with TS2012's inner workings and the new saved files weren't recognised so TS2012 defaulted back to the last 'good' copy which was the grey muck coaches with non see through windows.

 

So I had to do it all again.  

At least I did have the advantage this time of knowing what everything should be set to so it didn't take too long, but let us just say that I was not best pleased about it. 

 

Definitely worth it though because the coaches look so much better now.  The GCR bogie coaches I use on the layout were partly afflicted with the same problem so I fixed them as well while all the settings were still fresh in my mind.  For some reason Ken Green who is the maker of these coaches seems to like muting down his coaches and greying out all the colours.  BUT I don't!  Why model the pre-grouping era at all if the lovely liveries can't be seen.  On my layout the coaches are kept CLEAN and shall be forever more, Amen!

 

[MikeOxon]

I agree that they do look nice, with the gilt lettering gleaming in the light.  I shall tread slowly and carefully with Trainz, since one of my pet hates is clunky and unreliable software!  It took me a few years to gain confidence with tweaking MS FlightSim but there were loads of good documents to help.  So far, I have not much of a feel for the 'nuts and bolts' of the RailSim and intend not to let myself get too distracted from real modelling, while I can still do it.

 

i also agree that pre-grouping is all about colourful liveries.

[Annie]

Yes take it slow Mike.  When I first started off with TS2009 it must've been about a year's worth of tinkering and getting the feel of the simulator before I started to do anything really decent with it.

[Annie]

 

Trees!  As a first step towards ultimately moving my GER & Affiliated (Imaginary) Companies layout across to either TANE or TS2019 I've been working on changing all the trees on the layout to ones that are compatible with the later simulators.  TS2012 uses  32 bit 'Speedtree' models of an early type that are not compatible with TANE and TS2019 and if I was to move the layout across to them without changing the trees first there's a very good chance that the later simulators would simply randomly replace these obsolete Speedtrees with others from their asset libraries.  Should that happen there's also a risk that the replacement trees would become locked in place so they couldn't be changed.  This happened when I moved the old TS2004 Minehead branch layout I like more than a bit from TS2012 to TS2019 and there was an awful invasion of the boofy trees onto the layout.  (A 'boofy tree' being an odd small lollipop like tree that just looks downright strange)  Fortunately with the boofy trees being small it was relatively easy to screen them with larger trees, but it made for a lot of extra work.

 

Boofy trees, - the invasion.

 

The tree conversion work is just about done now with not too many problems along the way.  There were a couple of places on the layout that had a very large single tree that were useful as landmarks since I'm more than capable of getting lost on my own layout so it took a bit of searching to find suitable large tree models that would make a good replacement, but we got there in the end.

 

The tree models I'm using are made by a member of the creator group I belong to and they not only look good for what are quite simple models, but also have a much smaller memory footprint than the old TS2012 Speedtrees.  Speedtrees are assembled from mesh and texture libraries rather than being stand alone individual models and this gives them the capacity to be varied in size.  They are also animated so they look like they are moving in the wind.  I only found out recently that the old TS2012 Speedtrees are terrible memory hogs and sure enough as I progressively changed them out the numbers displayed on the framerate counter in the corner of my computer screen started to gradually climb.

The layout is looking a lot better with the new trees and there's still some places where I'll be shifting and changing some trees around to make them look more appealing to my eyes, but overall I'm very pleased.  I still have a few miles of lineside hedgerows to adjust, though the tree model I'm using is just plain better than the old one, - and this one won't go walkabout as I mentioned the old model used to do in an earlier posting a page or two back.

[Regularity]

Impressive crop circle there, Annie...