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

[Martin S-C]

Lovely scenery in that second pic Annie and I like that 4-wheeled tender a lot.

[Annie]

The whole Minehead branch layout is like that Martin.  The scenery is nicely done without being overblown and from what others have told me it's a good representation of the area.  The only part of the layout I never liked was the station and town at Taunton where the original layout builder had lost the plot more than a little with trying to represent it all.  Having made a frustrating attempt to improve the representation of Taunton before on the original Broad Gauge version I decided to simply delete the Taunton area and replace it with portals.  Some people like big multiplatform stations and operating trains in and out of them, - well I don't.  And if the station is a bit of a mess to start with and needs fixing my interest in the whole idea just falls to zero.

 

And yes I like the fact that my Beyer-Peacock has a four wheel tender, - and it's a nice tender too.  Some other versions of this engine sold elsewhere by B-P had six wheel tenders, but I much prefer the appearance of the four wheel tender.

 

Old first class coaches tended to have much longer working lives due to their posh interiors and some lasted in service much longer than you might think; - so I dug about in my digital trainset box and found these two coaches.  As you can see they are smaller than even my 1870's coaches, but I think they will have their uses.  The old 6 wheel coupe first could almost be used in an observation coach type role as well as an inspection coach for when the bowler hatted officials from head office want to have a poke about the line.

[Annie]

A new cab interior with more bells and whistles.  Everything is interactive and operates which is very nice.  The only downside is that it's a left hand drive cab and I prefer to drive on the right hand side.  Fully interactive tank engine cabs are a bit thin on the ground in Trainz so I have to take what I can get and like it.

 

More test running on the Minehead branch.  Steep long gradients are par for the course so I'm certainly getting an education in how to drive using the advanced steam controls.  It's certainly a lovely layout to drive an engine over though.

 

Bishops Lydeard where I run around the train and head back to Minehead again; - which is its own driving challenge since most of it is downhill.

 

Crowcombe Heathfield on the downhill journey.  And yes I came into station on the wrong platform road.  Too busy watching my braking and I forgot to set the points correctly.

 

New purchases.  1860s carriage truck and horsebox.  I got some 1850s end door coke wagons as well.  Looks like I'm going to be taking a break from  the 20th century pre-grouping era for a wee while.

 

I'm still working on the single driver tank engines and trying to get them to work properly.  Quite a few engine specs for tank engines don't have the ability to start the single driving wheel moving and those engine specs that can start the engines moving are generally too powerful and over boilered which turns them into 'Race to the North' contenders.  I think I need to do some weights and measures checking too because I think their weight in their config files is too heavy and I think the amount of water the config file says they're able to carry is too high as well.  The simulator takes coal and water weight into account so if these specs are wrong it's going to make it just about impossible to set things up properly.

At the moment No.8 can do the climb up to Bishops Lydeard on 3% cutoff which is clearly not right.

 

Edited April 10, 2019 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Martin S-C]

The horse box and open carriage truck are delightful.

I'm aware you didn't build the route and its possible that scenery parts are limited but platform edges were not painted white until the WW2 blackout.

[Annie]

For some reason or another I didn't know that Martin.  I wonder if I can do a reskin on the platform and take it back in time.

[Annie]

I was right about the weights and measures specs in the single driver tank engine's config file.  The weight of the engine itself was correct, but it was carrying over four times the amount of water it was supposed to be carrying.  So that was 60,000 pounds of water (approximately) added to the weight of the engine that shouldn't have been there.  No wonder I was having problems setting up an engine spec!

[Annie]

Subsequent testing with what should have been an ideal engine spec and wasn't working before due to the engines being overloaded with water have shown that I was right on the money with correcting the water capacity to the prototype spec.  My single driver tank engines are now nice to drive and work as I'd expect them to work.  Not overpowered, but capable enough with lighter train loads of a weight they can manage.

 

An important job that I'd been putting off for a while was setting the cab interior for the single driver tank engines to the right height relative to the world around them.  They'd been too high by about two and a half feet for far too long and on a tightly curved and steeply graded line like the Minehead branch that made a big difference to what could be seen in the forward view from the cab.  It wasn't difficult to do just fiddly with having to make an adjustment to the locomotive's mesh attachment and then going into the simulator to see if it was correct or not.  A bit tedious, but I got there in the end.

 

One of the Beyer-Peacock single test engines ended up with an interactive cab from a Caley 4-4-0 for a while during testing.  All a wee bit odd since once I left cab mode with this engine it didn't have a cab anymore.  The interactive cab was a useful tool though and it did help during the testing process.

 

Random testing snap.  On the Minehead branch the climb up to Bishops Lydeard is absolutely unrelenting and continues for mile after mile.  It really is the perfect test track to test out an engine spec to see if it's going to do what it's supposed to do when using the advanced steam controls.

 

Today I was very tired and foggy brained and I spent sooooo much time crashed out asleep it wasn't funny so I didn't really get done what I wanted to do with the testing work on my collection of mostly 19th century engines.  It takes a bit of concentration to drive with the steam controls and my brain kept slipping off and dozing so I'd have to stop.  Perhaps I'll have a bit more luck with this project of mine tomorrow. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Annie]

I sometimes think I'm a foolish old woman doing inexplicable things with digital trainsets that nobody is interested in and I shouldn't even bother posting anything about it.  BUT then I'm having a really rough day with being on the wrong side of my narcolepsy symptoms today so possibly I'm just being silly.

 

I transferred my Minehead Branch test track over to the latest TS2019 version of the simulator.  TS2012 has this endearing habit of micro-pausing while it's running and I alway thought it was because I'd put too much detail into my layouts.  Just recently though my daughter helped me to upgrade my old monster of a Xeon workstation to having a second quad core processor, - that's 8 CPU cores,  - not quite brain the size of a planet stuff, but still pretty darn good.   Sooooooo ever the cheerful  optimist I thought I'd get no more problems with micro-pausing. 

 

However it was not to be.  While TS2012 does run a little smoother it still micro-pauses.  Every time I went to make a control adjustment in one of the interactive steam engine cabs TS2012 would micro-pause making doing something like approaching a station and braking to a stop in the right place at the platform just about impossible.

 

So I'm going to work on gradually transferring all my layout projects over to the new version of the simulator and archive TS2012 because while I like everything else about this version its habit of pausing while running is now beyond a joke.  It's going to be quite a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

 

Eastlingwold & Great Mulling No.3 at Dunster.  First passenger train on the line running in the TS2019 version.

[sem34090]

I hope that nobody minds me taking the liberty of renaming this thread to better represent its content and my editing of the first post to make it more useful, for my purposes at any rate - 

 

[Annie]

Thank you very much for doing that Dan.  I did kind of move in here and take over without meaning to.  The Auran Trainz forums can get a bit strange sometimes being mostly full of grumpy Americans, so I prefer to be here where people are nice and were brought up proper.

 

[BlueLightning]

7 hours ago, Annie said:

I'm a foolish old woman doing inexplicable things with digital trainsets that nobody is interested in and I shouldn't even bother posting anything about it

 

The only foolish thing is thoughts like these!! Hope you recover from your bad day and feel better!

 

Gary

[Edwardian]

Well, Annie, I generally feel like a foolish old man, chasing a railway dream, but your posts are always interesting and visually spectacular and, as all I have to look at is bare timber and half-built models, it's quite a refreshing dose of splendour. 

[Annie]

Yes it was just one of those bad days where I woke up feeling utterly wrecked, brain fogged and disorientated and if I don't watch out the black dog comes circling around and I get all these stupid thoughts in my head.  Things did get a bit better as the day went on though, but it did take a while.  Fortunately I don't get bad days like that too often.

 

The Auran/N3V digital newsletter dropped into my inbox and to my surprise one of my screenshots was featured in the newsletter.  That was certainly a bit of a thrill I can tell you.

For a long time US trains and modern error dismals have dominated the screenshot competitions so recently some of us Uk steam era Trainz folk decided to start putting our best screenshots into the competition

 

This is the full sized screenshot.  I titled it, 'Chatting to the driver'.

[Edwardian]

17 minutes ago, Annie said:

Yes it was just one of those bad days where I woke up feeling utterly wrecked, brain fogged and disorientated and if I don't watch out the black dog comes circling around and I get all these stupid thoughts in my head.  Things did get a bit better as the day went on though, but it did take a while.  Fortunately I don't get bad days like that too often.

 

The Auran/N3V digital newsletter dropped into my inbox and to my surprise one of my screenshots was featured in the newsletter.  That was certainly a bit of a thrill I can tell you.

For a long time US trains and modern error dismals have dominated the screenshot competitions so recently some of us Uk steam era Trainz folk decided to start putting our best screenshots into the competition

 

This is the full sized screenshot.  I titled it, 'Chatting to the driver'.

 

Very nice.  The chap with the 'tash seems to be looking at the camera.

 

I'd like to think of the title as "chatting up the driver", but that's because I'm at a difficult age. 

[Annie]

3 hours ago, BlueLightning said:

 

The only foolish thing is thoughts like these!! Hope you recover from your bad day and feel better!

 

Gary

Yes you are quite right Gary.  When I get bad thoughts like these I go through a mental process of reality checking which sometimes isn't easy when my brain is fogged up, but it does work and I gradually come to my senses and I shoot the black dog and (metaphorically) bury it in the garden.

 

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Well, Annie, I generally feel like a foolish old man, chasing a railway dream, but your posts are always interesting and visually spectacular and, as all I have to look at is bare timber and half-built models, it's quite a refreshing dose of splendour. 

A person like me who has narcolepsy and spends much of their time in REM sleep dreaming might not be the best person to ask about chasing dreams, but I personally feel that having a dream you want to realise is a seriously important thing to have.  Life can become an awful grey place to be without a dream to follow.

 

Since I'm largely housebound due to this illness I have being able to build landscapes that go on for miles and miles is something I really love about railway simulators.  A lot of the railways I model are usually single track running through miles of open landscape and I love that.  Some Uk Trainz folk build entire detailed cities with huge terminus stations and miles of shunting yards and while I can certainly admire what they've done, that's not for me.  Give me a small pre-grouping tank engine and its train chasing the horizon across a windswept Norfolk coastal landscape and I'd call that heaven.

[Annie]

4 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Very nice.  The chap with the 'tash seems to be looking at the camera.

 

I'd like to think of the title as "chatting up the driver", but that's because I'm at a difficult age. 

Yes it was only after I'd snapped the screenshot that I realised the chap in the coach had been looking towards me and my digital Box Brownie.

 

Ah well, - my own days of admiring good looking working men in overalls are long past James so I went for the more innocent title.

[Annie]

Snaps from running trains on the Minehead branch in the TS2019 simulator.  It wasn't too difficult transferring the layout over and getting it working, though there a few small fix up jobs still to do.

 

 

 

Approaching Watchet.

 

 

Going down the hill to Watchet on a trip working.  I forgot to have a brake van available in the goods yard at Williton so No.3 is doing without.

 

Williton yard.

 

 

A slightly amusing snap.  The TS2019 simulator will sometimes place figures of their AI robot drivers on the footplate.  Proper steam era drivers are rare with most being scruffy looking modern error types in hi-viz jackets, but there are some women drivers as well who are always smartly dressed, though not appropriately for being on a steam engine's footplate..

I call this snap, 'The Driving Lesson'.

 

And finally with teaching myself how to drive steam engines using the advanced steam controls I sometimes mess up and end up with a dead engine that won't raise steam that needs to be rescued.  Using the steam blower on a stationary engine is essential, - especially with my engines that have smaller boilers, but let the steam pressure fall too low and the blower won't work.  As you can see sometimes I forget this and have to sufferer being taken in tow and then shunted into a convenient siding..

The other thing I learned is when leaving an engine to raise steam on the blower is that making sure the brakes are applied is essential.  Sometimes in Trainz the regulator doesn't close fully and as you might have guessed once the steam pressure rises they'll be off to explore the world on their own.

 

 

 

 

Edited April 12, 2019 by Annie
added a picture

[Northroader]

Just looking at it, it struck me you’re very short on trees, you’ll have to go out with some virtual acorns in your pocket.

[Annie]

When I transferred the Minehead branch over to TS2019 certain tree models in TS2012 in were incompatible with the new simulator so they're missing from the landscape.  So yes I do need to go out and about on a planting spree in some places.

The part of the line along the coast from Minehead seems to have been a more sparsely treed area though so I most probably won't be doing very much planting there.

[Northroader]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7yqsOkD7-3M

[Annie]

Thank you very much for that video link Northroader.  Seeing the real line after driving up and down the virtual one over the past few day was certainly an interesting experience.  So yes more trees and vegetation are needed in many places and that should be a lot of fun to do, but I can also see that the line has open sparse areas as well so I'll need to be careful to maintain those contrasts.

Of course the unknown question is what did the line look like in the 1890s with regard to the amount of trees and general plant growth; - that of course is anybody's guess.  Perhaps it's time I finally got myself copies of Lightmoor's books on the Minehead Branch and Watchet since this virtual representation of the 1890s line is one that I'm very fond of and one that I've played trains on a lot over the past year or more in its Broad Gauge form.  And of course now that I'm teaching myself to drive engines properly on this standard gauge converted version it's going to see a lot more use.

[Northroader]

There was probably less trees back then, as there’d be a lot of use of firewood by the locals. The Railways also practised regular clearingof lineside areas, which has slipped in the last fifty odd years and only just getting recognised as creating problems if left.

[Annie]

Yes I was thinking there wouldn't be so much tree growth and mad hedgerow growth so close to the line in the pre-grouping era, but otherwise I certainly do need more trees in some areas and I could also plant a lot more grasses and wildflowers as I've done with my GER layout.

[Annie]

While hunting through my Trainz archive files looking for 19th century rolling stock I stumbled across a back up copy of my original TS2009 simulator.  Some of the layout building I was doing back then was not all that good and shall remain in the archives, but I did have a bit of a runabout on my half built Glasgow to Falkirk effort.  It might be worth resurrecting and taking across to TS2019 and giving it an overhaul.  I'll have a think about it.

 

 

[Annie]

Just because I felt like it I ran a train on the original Broad Gauge version of Turk's Castle (Minehead branch).

Those B&ER 4-4-0 saddle tanks are certainly capable old monsters.