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

[Hroth]

Nice Star, colour is reminiscent of Hornbt "soapy" green....

 

North Star is 1909, you could have it doing running in turns with a few local coaches.

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Hroth said:

Nice Star, colour is reminiscent of Hornby "soapy" green....

 

North Star is 1909, you could have it doing running in turns with a few local coaches.

That's a good idea since it plainly looks ex-works compared with the other locomotives I have on-shed at Longrock MPD.  With 'North Star' having been rebuilt as a 4-6-0 in 1909 it does fit in well with my late pre-grouping intentions for 'Penzance to Cambourne & Branches'.  On the other hand 4009 'Shooting Star' built 1907 was a Cornwall engine before being rebuilt as Castle class in 1925 so that could be a possibility as well.  The maker of the 'Star' models is a bit protective about people modding his engines, but he has said that he has no objections to making changes to number and name.

[Paleopotato09]

On 05/05/2022 at 18:29, Edwardian said:

 

Please tell me more!

I managed to pick up an Italian long boiler in ho scale that could be easily converted into a Stephenson long boiler of the period. 

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Paleopotato09 said:

I managed to pick up an Italian long boiler in ho scale that could be easily converted into a Stephenson long boiler of the period. 

 

Snap!

 

I too intend such a conversion, having previously used a Bourbonnais model to suggest a Stockton &Darlington/Central Division long-boiler for a school project. 

 

The Brampton Railway had two Stephenson long-boiler tanks that it converted to tender engines and these shall be my models for a similar loco for my freelance Norfolk Minerals Railway.

 

[Paleopotato09]

36 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

Snap!

 

I too intend such a conversion, having previously used a Bourbonnais model to suggest a Stockton &Darlington/Central Division long-boiler for a school project. 

 

The Brampton Railway had two Stephenson long-boiler tanks that it converted to tender engines and these shall be my models for a similar loco for my freelance Norfolk Minerals Railway.

 

wonderful to have a photo to actually work from. 
The model came from Glasgow and is painted in something that looks very similar to Caledonian railway blue 

I'll send some pictures later 

[Paleopotato09]

The model as it arrived at my door 

[Annie]

I've had a few problems with getting my Norfolk layout to load and work properly in TRS22.  In the other 64 bit versions of Trainz I had no issues with the layout loading into the simulator, but several build numbers of these versions were buggy and had more than a few annoying problems.  With TRS22 nearly all of these bugs have been sorted out and the virtual world created in the simulator looks good without any of the strange environmental lighting problems of the earlier versions. 

 

The only problem now is that a lot more computer resources seem to be used in rendering the virtual environment and my old monster of a dual quad core Xeon computer is struggling to keep up.  My Norfolk layout has wide expanses of rural countryside sometimes extending for several miles and plainly it's these that were placing an undue load on my poor old Xeon computer. 

 

I've known for a while now that some sections of my Norfolk layout are not fitted together all that well with other sections; - so what I decided to do as a temporary measure is to remove the Eastlingwold & Great Mulling section and the B&FER section from Bleakhorse Road to Foxhollow along with the Mirely St Marys section.  What I have left is the Hopewood & Windweather Tramways including the Windweather Loop line, - along with the complete Tenpenny Branch from Tenpenny Harbour to Lockes Soak;  AND the GER/B&FER section from the return loop beyond Bunbury including Moxbury and the intermediate stations to Brenton Wood and Barrow Hills:  AND the GER/GCR Joint line from Little Keldon to Brenton Wood.  The tracks that used to connect to the now missing sections now end in portal tracks.

In effect what I now have is my original Norfolk layout from TS2012 , with the addition of the Moxbury-Bunbury section and the Tenpenny Branch.  The acreage of rural countryside has been heavily reduced with only the coastal Windweather section having a large open area of landscape, but that's not particularly graphically intensive since it's meant to be open fen country.

 

I'm saving up for a Windows 11 compatible computer since my old Xeon is just too plain old to run Win 11; - and with the poor old thing not managing so well these days I plan on getting some kind of cutting edge computer with an insanely powerful multi-core processor and GTX480000 graphics card.  Once I have the new machine I'll reassemble my Norfolk layout in a more sensible configuration, but I suppose by then it will be TRS24 that's just come out and my problems will start all over again.

 

Great Marsh MPD

 

Windweather MPD

 

Mosston on Sea.

[Edwardian]

Lovely pictures, Annie

[Edwardian]

1 hour ago, Paleopotato09 said:

The model as it arrived at my door 

 

 

Very nice.  The colour suits.

 

This was done to represent a S&D/Central Division Long Boiler, though it conforms to no one prototype class, for my daughter's Victorian Railways school project back in 2018:

 

 

 

 

[Hroth]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

 

This was done to represent a S&D/Central Division Long Boiler, though it conforms to no one prototype class, for my daughter's Victorian Railways school project back in 2018:

 

 

 

 

 

FOUR years ago????

 

Where has the time gone?

 

[rocor]

16 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

FOUR years ago????

 

Where has the time gone?

 

 

Where time always goes?

 

[Regularity]

21 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

FOUR years ago????

 

Where has the time gone?

 

My daughter was 23 last month…

[Hroth]

3 minutes ago, rocor said:

 

Where time always goes?

 

 

What an excellent model of an Event Horizon....

 

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Paleopotato09 said:

The model as it arrived at my door 

Was it Railway Modeller that published the article on how to do this conversion?  Even in its somewhat tired and dusty state the model certainly looks good despite its age.

[Annie]

Midnight Broad Gauge Cheer Up Picture:

 

[Paleopotato09]

3 hours ago, Edwardian said:

 

 

Very nice.  The colour suits.

 

This was done to represent a S&D/Central Division Long Boiler, though it conforms to no one prototype class, for my daughter's Victorian Railways school project back in 2018:

 

 

 

 

honestly the bit that baffles me the most is the lamp. Did head codes exist yet? 

[Annie]

4 minutes ago, Paleopotato09 said:

honestly the bit that baffles me the most is the lamp. Did head codes exist yet? 

They did, but during the pre-grouping era each railway company had their own unique lamp codes.  The GER (which I model) as one example had codes showing green to the front which just about gave the newly formed LNER conuptions in 1924.  Where running powers existed over a company lines there would often be lamp codes a 'foreign' locomotive had to carry to show to show they weren't a company locomotive.  It's a whole fascinating subject all on its own.

[Compound2632]

15 minutes ago, Annie said:

They did, but during the pre-grouping era each railway company had their own unique lamp codes.  The GER (which I model) as one example had codes showing green to the front which just about gave the newly formed LNER conuptions in 1924.  Where running powers existed over a company lines there would often be lamp codes a 'foreign' locomotive had to carry to show to show they weren't a company locomotive.  It's a whole fascinating subject all on its own.

 

Many (most?) of the major companies adopted RCH standard headcodes on 1 February 1903 but exceptions continued, certainly in the London area, on lines south of the Thames. I can well imagine that the Great Eastern continued with some non-standard codes for its complex network of routes in the London area too.

[Paleopotato09]

all good things to know 

 

[Caley Jim]

4 hours ago, Regularity said:

My daughter was 23 last month…

My youngest was 40 last year!  🙄

 

Jim

[Caley Jim]

3 hours ago, Annie said:

They did, but during the pre-grouping era each railway company had their own unique lamp codes.  The GER (which I model) as one example had codes showing green to the front which just about gave the newly formed LNER conuptions in 1924.  Where running powers existed over a company lines there would often be lamp codes a 'foreign' locomotive had to carry to show to show they weren't a company locomotive.  It's a whole fascinating subject all on its own.

The 2MM Scale Association publish a book entitled 'Train Lamps and Headcodes'.  Available on the Association's 'Roadshow' stand at exhibitions.

 

Jim

[Annie]

3 hours ago, Caley Jim said:

My youngest was 40 last year!  🙄

 

Jim

My youngest was 35 in March so I'm not so far behind you Jim.

 

3 hours ago, Caley Jim said:

The 2MM Scale Association publish a book entitled 'Train Lamps and Headcodes'.  Available on the Association's 'Roadshow' stand at exhibitions.

 

Jim

Now that would be a useful book to have.

 

 

GWR Head codes 1918

Edited May 10, 2022 by Annie
More words needed.

[MikeOxon]

23 hours ago, Annie said:

I'm saving up for a Windows 11 compatible computer since my old Xeon is just too plain old to run Win 11; - and with the poor old thing not managing so well these days I plan on getting some kind of cutting edge computer with an insanely powerful multi-core processor and GTX480000 graphics card. 

as I understand it, the main thing about Win 11 is that it requires various security features to be present in hardware on the motherboard.  There seem to be few enhancements in terms of actual number-crunching capability.  One thing to consider when installing more advanced hardware is whether your software is capable of making use of the extra features.  Can TRSxx actually use all those cores and all the high-end graphics card features?

[Johnson044]

I've finally succumbed! I've not looked at this thread before, being a bit put off by the word "Virtual" but now I'm hooked! Absolutely brilliant! 

 

Well - that's MY lunchtimes occupied for a while!

 

Well done Annie!

[Annie]

3 hours ago, MikeOxon said:

as I understand it, the main thing about Win 11 is that it requires various security features to be present in hardware on the motherboard.  There seem to be few enhancements in terms of actual number-crunching capability.  One thing to consider when installing more advanced hardware is whether your software is capable of making use of the extra features.  Can TRSxx actually use all those cores and all the high-end graphics card features?

*Warning! warning! geek computer talk*

 

Those are good points Mike.  Tech savvy members of the creator group I belong to have confirmed that Win 11 is mainly about security protocols and apart from that not that much different to Win 10 in real world terms.  The main problem is that in about four years or so Win 10 is going to hit end of life and not be supported anymore.  My old Xeon runs well, but its architecture is showing its age and while it had eight cores they are only 1.85Gb each, - and it definitely won't run Win 11.  I recently tried a Nvidia GTX 1650 graphics card in the Xeon only the two quad core CPU's couldn't feed data to it fast enough due to bottlenecking and it was worse than the older GTX 950 I was using before, - so I went back to the old, but still good GTX 950.

 

My Xeon runs older versions of Trainz just fine.  The SP1 version of TS2019 runs well, - later versions after SP1 are buggy.  They run Ok on the Xeon, but the bugs are a constant source of irritation.  The latest version, -TRS22 - fixed a lot of things people had been complaining about for ages, but it requires a step up in hardware to get it to run properly.  Presently many Trainz folk are using the latest six core i7 processors and cutting edge Nvidia graphics card to run Trainz and the results are impressive.  I have no objection to saving up and buying a computer like that, - only with the Win 10 end of life thing on the horizon and the fact that the computers are still being sold that can't run WIn 11 I'm going to hold off and wait for a bit.

 

The COVID pandemic knocked all kinds of processor manufacture really badly so computer manufacturers were buying whatever they could get and were sometimes quite shifty about the often obsolete parts that were going into new computers.  When the first beta versions of Win 11 were released a lot of owners of brand new computers were horrified to find that their new purchases weren't compatible with Win 11 due to the presence of obsolete chipsets on their new computer's motherboard.  A local builder of custom computers here in NZ was caught out recently for using obsolete components and chipsets that wouldn't run Win 11 and being deceptive about it, - so the only way to be sure that that a new computer is the real deal is to make sure it has Win 11 installed right from the start.  

 

Once Win 10 hits the end huge numbers of computers are going to get dumped.  Plainly Microsoft couldn't give a tinker's damn about that.  At least here a major computer recycler has recently installed the latest specialist machinery to grind up old computers and other scrap tech and separate out all the various metals & etc so they can be reused, - but despite that a lot will still dumped in landfills.

If it wasn't for Win 11 and Win 10 hitting the end soon I'd be buying myself a more recent model ex-lease Xeon than what I've got like I usually do, but that bird isn't going to fly anymore.