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

[Annie]

On 26/08/2019 at 01:51, Northroader said:

p.s. the Monogram you showed isn’t Cornwall Railway, it’s an old GWR one, you’ll find it on station overbridges done when they had a purge in the 1880s

Bother!  The Cornwall Railway Society had it captioned as being a Cornwall Railway monogram.  Still it's rather nice and makes a change from the later and more familiar GWR monogram.  My 'Sharpies' having it on their bunker sides can be counted as revenge for the inherited 'Sharpies' from lines the GWR acquired and unfairly scrapped far too soon.

 

[Northroader]

I would have thought some American rail fans would have worked out how to do with the mixed gauge bits of the Denver and Rio Grande by now? I’ve been refreshing my two foot id today.

 

Edited August 28, 2019 by Northroader

[Charlie586]

I remember seeing some train sim pictures on the broad gauge soc web group, I imagine they must have come from Steve Flanders's models too. The late express carriages and luggage van are what I'm trying to create. I don't know if you've come across it but there was a broad gauge fish brake van (Tadpole A) that ran with expresses from Cornwall to the market in London, that would make a good model.

Mixed gauge would have been good for complicated pointwork as it always looks over engineered. I think the St Ives branch was only ever broad gauge (not mixed) until 1892 as it was a later addition.

[Annie]

4 hours ago, Northroader said:

I would have thought some American rail fans would have worked out how to do with the mixed gauge bits of the Denver and Rio Grande by now? I’ve been refreshing my two foot id today.

 

It was a meeting of minds Northroader with Steve Flanders who is very much Mr Broad Gauge for the UK side and one of the best of the US scene digital modellers (sorry forgot his name) with the attempt at creating  functional mixed gauge track.  Making a static model of the trackwork is no problem at all, it's getting Trainz models to run on it that's the problem.

 

4 hours ago, Charlie586 said:

I remember seeing some train sim pictures on the broad gauge soc web group, I imagine they must have come from Steve Flanders's models too. The late express carriages and luggage van are what I'm trying to create. I don't know if you've come across it but there was a broad gauge fish brake van (Tadpole A) that ran with expresses from Cornwall to the market in London, that would make a good model.

Mixed gauge would have been good for complicated pointwork as it always looks over engineered. I think the St Ives branch was only ever broad gauge (not mixed) until 1892 as it was a later addition.

Yes the only Broad Gauge locomotive models available for the Trainz simulator are all Steve Flanders work.  With goods wagons there are two other modellers, John Whelan and Bob Sanders, who have made Broad Gauge  goods wagons along with Steve's contributions and all the coaches available are by Steve Flanders.

 

I haven't seen any fish vans for the Broad Gauge, just the open 6 wheel fish wagons which are again Steve Flander's work.  You have to love the GWR telegraphic wagon codes though.  Tadpoles for London. - yum!

 

 

 

[Annie]

Some pictures. 

 

 

Only some very minor work was done around the station area today since it's basically how I want it to be.  Mostly I was trying to fix a mess of a tunnel.  The tunnels is a very short one at the western end of Truro's station yard, -  and just because it's short it doesn't mean it's easy to deal with.

 

Trainz has a really useless way of doing tunnels.  The older method was by use of a tunnel spline that had to be laid along the underlying landscape meshes gridlines and did not take at all kindly to any attempt to install a tunnel on a diagonal line.  The later method involved putting holes in the landscape mesh called 'digholes' and running the tunnel through those.  This method has the advantage that a tunnel can be laid down in any direction, but there's the small matter of the gaping holes in the landscape to deal with and try to hide.

The layout's original builder had hidden the mess of his attempt at using the dighole method by covering everything with densely packed trees and shrubs  which I am certainly not going to do.

 

This is my first attempt at the tunnel which I'm still not very happy with.  The grey thing above the tunnel mouth to the left is a rock which I've decided to hate and will be deleting.

My method of doing a difficult tunnel is to use no digholes at all and to just run the tunnel through the landscape.  I put the tunnel mouths in place and paint the visible piece of landscape that can seen through the tunnel mouth a sooty black colour.  The landscape mesh has no collision setting so trains will just pass through it and into the tunnel interior and out the other side.

More work still needed in my opinion so I'll be going off shortly to frown at it some more.

 

Other snaps.  I can't make up my mind whether or not to delete the wildflower on this section of the line.

 

The inspection train has acquired a 6 wheel sleeping carriage and the old 1st class coach has been exchanged for a 1st/2nd composite.

 

The 'Sharpie' is enormous fun to drive.

 

Next big job.  This viaduct is soon to be replaced by Brunel timber viaduct.

 

 

Edited August 29, 2019 by Annie
fumble brain

[Annie]

The Tunnel!  For such a short tunnel it involved me in a huge amount of landscape bashing.  For a start I decided that the cutting leading to the tunnel was too deep so I lowered all the surrounding landscape which involved all kinds of smoothing out everything so it looked tidy again.  Then I decided I would use digholes even though they are horrible to work with.  I used the same tunnel mouth as before with its attached section of grassy hill which I'd retextured to match the ground texture I was using (though it could do with a little more colour adjustment) because it was a good sort of Broad Gauge type tunnel with plenty of clearance and I happen to like it.

I tried to make the dighole as small as I could, but it still ended up too big and that was when all the tedious work started.  I found that I could cut and paste small pieces of the landscape mesh onto the edges of the dighole.  The downside was that the smallest piece was the same size as the underlying landscape mesh grid and it was impossible to change its orientation to be different to the orientation of the landscape grid.  But once I had the pieces in place I was able to sculpt them to fit against the tunnel mouth's shaped hill piece, -though for a while there it looked a right mess.

 

 

The tunnel in place with all the landscape bashing done.  I still need to fit the tunnel wall section which is why it all looks a bit odd.  The passengers will just have to close their eyes as the train crosses the terrible nothing until I recover enough to fight with the tunnel wall mesh to get it into right position.

 

[Annie]

The most annoying bit about doing a job like that tunnel is that I crash out and sleep for hours afterwards.  But it is done now and I learned a lot of new things on the way such as to never build layouts with tunnels.  Patching new pieces of ground mesh onto a dighole and sculpting them to the shape I wanted was definitely something I'd never tried before.

 

Something interesting I found on the 1880 map about the junction for the branch to Newham.  There is very plainly a railway formation which would have been one side of a triangular junction, only there's no track.  Checking later maps shows it still either unused or out or use and there's no earlier map in the NLS archives to check back earlier than 1878.  The original layout builder had restored the missing trackwork to the junction and I'm of a mind to keep it rather than go for total historical accuracy and remove it.

 

 

 

Further along the Newham branch.  The line ends in a portal so it's not very long.  Fortunately I don't need to do much along here except for smoothing some of the jagged bits in the landscape.  The alert among you will have noted that the trees have changed.  The originals trees on the layout were trees known as 'Ultratrees' which can do all kind of things like change the colour of their leaves with the season.  They are also very memory hungry and when massed together can slow even the best computer to a crawl.  So I changed them for much simpler tree models made by a member of the creator group I belong to.  After I did that the frame rate (frames per second, - the speed with which the computer can draw the image on screen) instantly doubled.  Things will improve more once I've thinned out the densely packed trees on the layout to a more sensible level.

 

 

Something I've noticed while researching old buildings are the words, - 'demolished to make way for a supermarket', or alternatively 'demolished to make way for a carpark' at the conclusion of the paragraph concerning the said building.  Plainly supermarkets and carparks must be immediately banned since they are such a terrible threat to the historic fabric of Britain.  

 

 

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Annie
fumble brain

[Annie]

Disaster!  I can't find a double track tunnel lining mesh that will accept Broad Gauge Engines and rolling stock without it cutting through the walls of the mesh.  Everything is made for insignificant sized narrow standard gauged engines and rolling stock!

However I did manage to snatch a small victory from the jaws of disaster in that some time ago I made a false tunnel wall piece for a different layout and it fitted perfectly into my lovely Broad Gauge tunnel.

 

The texture is made from a photo of a railway tunnel here in New Zealand and in this case it has won through again with making my new tunnel look something like it is supposed to.

 

I really do love driving my 'Sharpies' since after quite a bit of fettling on my part they are a real driver's engine.  If they weren't made from all manner of payware parts I'd give them away to railway enthusiast folk as cheer-up  devices.

 

 

For the moment inspections only go as far as Perranwell since I want to get everything largely sorted east of Perranwell before I start working on anywhere else.  I can see that I've got months of work ahead of me, but if I want a proper railway that's the only way I'll get one.

Perranwell station and yard needs a lot of work.  The village itself isn't too bad.   All I've done is correct the track alignment and pointwork so it is now possible to shunt the yard, - which it wasn't before!

 

Mostly working around Treyew at the moment (see map in earlier post) and I'm making some headway.  I've been deleting about two trees out of every three and the area is still looking nice and treey, but with the advantage that it's now possible to see all the scenic details whereas before it was all hidden under the trees.

Something else I did was change the dry grass along the track side to green grass since I always set my layouts in early Summer.  As I go along I can adjust the position of the grass or delete it, - whatever is necessary to get the look I want.

 

No grass and wildflower problems on this embankment though since it's the site for the Brunel viaduct at Penwithers.  All the embankments on the line that previously were timber viaducts are going to be changed back.  Fortunately I've found some more Brunel viaduct models based on those on the Launceston Branch so I should be able to end up with something worthwhile.

 

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Annie
stuff done all wrong

[Martin S-C]

On 21/08/2019 at 04:51, Annie said:

Falmouth 1888.  I do love old OS maps.  I particularly like the slightly unfortunate 'Mud, Dock & Railway Hotel' designation on this map.

 

 

 

"Bar Terrace" is my favourite name there. Just imagine a street with a whole terrace of bars. Wonderful.

And ponds made of timber. What curious folk these Cornishmen be.

[Annie]

[Annie]

Penwithers viaduct WIP.  Embankment removed, a valley that wasn't there in progress of creation and there will be a stream that also wasn't there to be placed in the valley along with a cornmill further along the valley behind the camera.  So lots to do, but it's all going well.

The timber viaduct is based on the Magpie viaduct on the Launceston Branch and it's doing really nicely in its new role as the Penwithers viaduct.  (Compare with the earlier picture of the embankment before I started work)

 

(snap taken in Surveyor)

 

Another tunnel!  This one was basically alright except that the original layout builder had used a tunnel lining mesh that wasn't tall enough for the tunnel portal so it looked like a huge soggy black sock hanging in the portal.  After a bit of hunting around I found a lining mesh that was the right size and a good fit, - aaaand then I had to pull everything all apart to fit the lining mesh and then put it all back together again.

 

(snap taken in Surveyor)

 

One more tunnel left, but it's basically ok.  I'd like to fit a better set of portals though if I can find any to suit.

 

 

Edited August 30, 2019 by Annie
more to say

[Annie]

 

Back in the day the coloured OS maps cost six bob and the plain uncoloured ones cost 2/6d.  I just thought I'd throw that out there for your edumication.  The coloured maps are a lot nicer to work with of course and the NLS makes no financial distinction between the two types when they sell you one, but so far the ones I've purchased have been all coloured ones.  The one annoying Thing is though, - the Falmouth branch seems to be great at just clipping by on the edges of a map so more maps are needed than if the line had conveniently run through the middle of the maps.

 

Going by the map the Magpie viaduct from Launceston has the same number of piers as the Penwithers viaduct so if I assume pier spacing to be the same I got lucky.  I'd hate the viaduct to be looked down on by its piers because it was one short.

The Magpie viaduct model is a fixed model that can't be curved like the Moorswater viaduct model I have and all five of the Launceston viaducts models I have are straight.  All the major Falmouth branch viaducts are curved to some degree so I'm hoping I'm not going to strike any problems. 

The Launceston models were made by an incredibly talented content creator for Trainz, - who has unfortunately died just recently after a long illness, - and he was particularly talented at making bridges.  There are literally hundreds of examples of his work on Auran/N3V's download station.

[Annie]

Stop press!  A photo of the Penwithers viaduct has been found.

 

The first thing I noticed is that the valley is deeper than I've done it.  The Magpie viaduct doesn't have very tall piers so I made the valley fit the viaduct.  I do have a viaduct of the same length, but with taller piers, but I think they might be too tall.  With the Launceston models they are made you can't just cheat and sink them into the ground if the piers are too tall.  The ground has to be sculpted to fit.

This will mean that the whole area by Penwithers and the Treyew corn mill will have to be sculpted and shaped into a being a deeper valley than it is now.  Or not if I just keep the Magpie viaduct and cast myself back into the honeyed clouds of ignorance.  Aaaaaaagh!

 

Edit:  More annoying information!

 

Milepost 301.5, 0.25mi west of the junction with the West Cornwall Railway. 
A Class A viaduct 90ft high and 813ft long on 12 piers. It was rebuilt as an embankment in 1926.

 

Where did they get 12 piers from?  (checks map more closely) Bother! there are 12 piers.

And 90ft high!

 

I'm going off to demolish all the modern buildings in Truro to cheer myself up.

Edited August 31, 2019 by Annie
Grumpy

[Annie]

A cheer up picture urgently needed!

 

 

I first saw a picture of this particular B&ER locomotive when I was but a skinny slip of a girl in High School and it stole my heart away and kindled my love of the Broad Gauge that I've had ever since.  I never would have been able to manage to build a physical model based on the Cornwall Railway so the Trainz simulator has given me the freedom to build and create (and upset myself with suddenly discovered historical photos!) that I never would have been able to do otherwise; - and certainly not now that I'm an invalid who is largely housebound.

[Annie]

It's very quiet.  I always worry at times like this that BR Blue error heretics have captured everybody and dragged them off in chains to indoctrinate them into their vile ways.

 

But even if I am talking (typing) to myself I'll carry on regardless.

 

 

So Brunel viaducts.  It seems that the maker of the viaducts thought that 10 piers in length would be fine for most circumstances except for the rather magnificent 20 pier long one shown in the picture.  He did some small two pier ones as well which should be very useful.

I am going to change the Magpie viaduct and use the one with the brown stone piers instead because the piers look to be about the right height to suit the depth of the valley without me having to get into too much more ground sculpting.

 

The maker of these viaducts also made the viaducts that replaced them, - only he made them with Broad Gauge track.  Which makes me wonder if he was thinking in terms of an alternative history where the Broad Gauge prevailed.  

 

I did go off and do some more cleaning up around Truro, - which is something I needed to do anyway.  The remaining (surviving) parts of the town are now close to being the size of the 1880's town so the next job will be to adjust all the streets into the right places and start to look more critically at the houses and other buildings that have survived the purge.

 

Just as a by the way I found this picture of the Carnon viaduct near Perranwell and what very much struck me was the open landscape in the background.  And I've seen the same thing in other old photos.  I'm really not sure at all what Bob Cooper the original layout builder was thinking when he created his thickly tree covered version of Cornwall.  I've been cutting out two trees out of every three and in some places there's still too many trees.  I think I should start treating this layout the same way as I did when I was building my Norfolk imaginary railways GER layout and go for an open bare windswept look.  I can alway add trees where needed later, but at the moment it's impossible to get any sense of the lie of the land at all and so many things like roads and farmsteads and even small villages are almost completely hidden under the trees.

 

[Compound2632]

35 minutes ago, Annie said:

It's very quiet.  I always worry at times like this that BR Blue error heretics have captured everybody and dragged them off in chains to indoctrinate them into their vile ways.

 

 

All right and Midland red here! 

 

Speaking of which, shouldn't the Tadpoles be red too?

 

Enjoying the virtual terraforming.

 

[Annie]

Yes they should be red.  I do have an older smaller version by Paulz Trainz that's red, but for some reason Steve Flanders did his ones in grey.  I'm still learning about BG goods wagon liveries and as I've got goods wagons in a variety of colours I really should try to figure out which ones belong to which time period.

 

Edit:  Checking on gwr.org.uk made it all as clear as mud for the post Broad Gauge era, but for my time period it seems to be light red until falling out of favor after the midish 1870s (all very vague) and then a darker red.  Mention is made of varnished wood, brown and black in the earlier period, but not with much in the way of specific detail.

Brake vans seem to have become grey sometime in the 1880s

Edited August 31, 2019 by Annie
more to say

[Annie]

Treyew corn mill, - or at least what's passing for it.  This is the only large water mill available for Trainz and it's an older model with shocking texture mapping, twists in its meshes and horrible textures.  I fixed what I could with the textures and fudged the rest by covering up the worst bits.  It's only going to be a background piece viewed at a distance from the railway line so it will do until I can find something better.

 

A closer view of the Brunel viaduct I will be using at Penwithers.  I only managed to pick an area to reshape for the viaduct and the stream in the valley that was full of sheep.  I don't know how many dozens I've moved to safer pastures but it was a lot.

 

Playing at running the 'Cornishman'.  The scenery might be all a half done mess, but the line is still open.

 

 

 

I'm actually considering removing all the West Cornwall line past Chacewater and putting in portals to represent the rest of the line.  The section to Chacewater is quite attractive and rural, but after Chacewater the repair work that will be needed on the line starts to stack up horribly and I don't find myself having much enthusiasm for it.

[Annie]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/LENGTH-OF-GWR-BROAD-GAUGE-RAIL/163838473471?hash=item262588b4ff:g:GXUAAOSwOTZdSvV7    Just as well the vendor doesn't live around the corner from me.

 

[Annie]

 

Landscape sculpting all done and viaduct in place.  Just all the final tiddly bits with vegetation to do now.

Trackwork isn't connected yet and I've still got to sort out the embankment properly on the western side of things, but that shouldn't take long.

All this was not easy to do.  The Trainz landscape mesh is made up of scale five metre squares and trying to shape it into a landscape that doesn't look blocky or jagged edged isn't easy.  Put the landscape mesh into too much tension by trying to bend it too much and it will suddenly spring a pointy lump up somewhere which will need to be smoothed out, - hopefully without the same thing happening again.

 

More tree removal has happened.  The 25 inch to the mile OS maps show the position of every tree in the landscape, - except for in forests because that would be beyond any surveyor to cope with, - which means that I can see those places along fence lines and roads that did actually have a procession of trees along them instead of everywhere like the original layout builder did.  In the overall scheme of things there weren't that many in this landscape with most boundaries just being the standard hedgerow with the occasional tree here and there.

[BlueLightning]

Hello everyone!!

 

I'm sure some of you must remember my brief postings on this thread some time ago, quickly stopped by how poor my laptop was. However this week I finally got a new laptop, and as a result playing has restarted!!

 

 

I have never actually built a route on Trainz before, so I'm sure this one will end up being quite crude at first, but it seemed like a fun project to start with!!

 

Gary

[Annie]

The best way to learn Blue is to go ahead and do it.  I've still got some of my old routes archived away and they aren't much to look at compared with what I'm doing now.  Always remember the 'Undo' button is your friend when it comes to building a layout in Trainz.

 

Congratulations on the new laptop and a future before you spent in Trainz.  Just be aware though it does tend to be just a little addictive.........

Edited September 1, 2019 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[BlueLightning]

Thanks Annie,

 

I had already noticed the addictive nature of it. I forgot to do a couple of physical modelling jobs yesterday because I was busy playing Trainz!!

 

Gary

[Annie]

 

The Pyramid Company strikes again!

This is the kind of fun thing that will pop up when attempting to do landscape sculpting in Trainz.  Possibly it's a bit worse with this layout since in places the landscape has been roughly hacked about and then covered up by a few million  a large number of trees.  With me trying to do the open countryside thing I'm having to fix a lot of the landscape.  The popup pyramids aren't always as spectacular as that one, but in any size they are confounded nuisance.

 

In other news the trackwork has been restored again and the Penwither's viaduct is ready for use.  I had to re-establish a long gradient on the western side of the viaduct and lay it all out again and oh what fun we had.  I just sooooooo love laying out long gradients I could do it for hours  

[Charlie586]

On 31/08/2019 at 17:31, Annie said:

Yes they should be red.  I do have an older smaller version by Paulz Trainz that's red, but for some reason Steve Flanders did his ones in grey.  I'm still learning about BG goods wagon liveries and as I've got goods wagons in a variety of colours I really should try to figure out which ones belong to which time period.

 

Edit:  Checking on gwr.org.uk made it all as clear as mud for the post Broad Gauge era, but for my time period it seems to be light red until falling out of favor after the midish 1870s (all very vague) and then a darker red.  Mention is made of varnished wood, brown and black in the earlier period, but not with much in the way of specific detail.

Brake vans seem to have become grey sometime in the 1880s

 

For some reason I always think of the tadpoles with guards van as being brown, maybe I saw one painted brown once and it's stuck. Colour in general is a bit of a minefield, and I'm not looking forward to getting to that point.