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

[Annie]

I like running 'Hercules', but the one problem I had with this engine was that the footplate crew were hiding behind the haystack firebox so it looked like it was a runaway engine with nobody on the footplate.  The footplate crew were a combined mesh so it wasn't possible to move them to a better position so I modified the attachment point on the locomotive model's mesh so I could have two individual crew figures on the footplate instead.

Only a small mod, but I think it's a definite improvement.

 

 

[Annie]

Devastation of Truro; - the rebuild.  I needed to finish off the goods yard boundaries properly and to do that meant I had to place the beginning of Richmond Hill Road where it connects to Station Road so I could add in the Stationmaster's house site.  The building I'm using for the Stationmaster's house is a plausible placeholder and it will do until I can find something closer to the ground plan shown on the map.

I've also changed the goods shed.  The closest match is the goods shed at Redruth, - which isn't so surprising really since they would have been built around the same time.  The main difference is that the eastern end of Truro's goods shed is a blank wall and Redruth's goods shed is a through shed with an office attached on what would be on the Truro shed the eastern blank wall.  It will do though as I don't think I'm going to find anything better.

The row of nine ordinary identical little houses along Richmond Hill Road is actually reasonably correct since they all have survived despite some of them being horribly modernised.  I don't know if these were railway staff houses or not since I haven't been able to find out anything about them.  Richmond Terrace will start at the corner of the last house in the row and essentially run parallel to the goods yard in a slight curve (if you understand what I mean) until it finishes in a dead end.

The process I can see myself using is to gradually push St. Georges Road and Richmond Hill Road deeper into the town site deleting anything that's in the way until I can add in the streets that connect to them at their far ends.  As I go along I'll place houses in position along the streets that are of about the right sized footprint and age.  Hopefully by doing that I'll end up with something that's a reasonably plausible representation of the town.

 

I'm having to watch how much time I spend doing this though because if I keep pushing on once I start to feel sleepy I really pay for it by having seriously long sleep crash outs afterwards.

 

Edited September 23, 2019 by Annie
leaving out words and awful spelling

[Annie]

Distractions......

 

A member of the creator group I belong to has made available to group members some engines he made for Trainz Classic 3 that were never made publicly available.  I gave his H15 a run on my rebuilt version of the HUGE Uk layout, - the original layout being the first real layout I ever built up for Trainz.  I transferred it from TS2009 to TS2012 and it's had some fettling, but it's still basically the same old layout that introduced me to the Trainz simulator and started me off on building up my own layouts.  Its long double track mainline is very good for testing engines.

 

Some snaps.

 

 

 

 

 

The coaches are some that I re-textured a while ago and I went a bit overboard with them detailing the interiors from prototype photos and even using proper Southern Railway pictures and advertising in the compartments.  I'm not really into the Southern so I don't know why I did them, but at least they have a purpose now.

I have a 'N' class and a 'U' class as well.  A 47xx and a double chimney 'County' came along with the gift package too and no doubt I'll give those a run about as well when I feel like taking a break from 1880s Cornwall.  If they run as nicely as the H15 does I'm in for a treat.

 

 

[Annie]

I was fed up with landscape bashing so I decided to find something else to do.  I have some very old Broad Gauge models from 2005 made by a certain digital modelmaker whose name I will not mention and they are pretty mediocre with very simple textures.  Rather than just throw them back onto my archive hard drive I thought I'd see what I could do with them.  A four plank open wagon was chosen for my experiment and this is what I made of it.

 

 

I'd always meant to make a Metropolitan Pyramid Co wagon or two for my Norfolk railways, but I thought to myself, 'Why not', - and it was the Broad Gauge that got in first.  I really have no idea if PO wagons were in use on the Broad Gauge as I haven't seen any photographs or anything written anywhere to say they existed, but I decided not to care too much about that.

For what should have been a simple re-texture job became something of a monster when I decided that the wagons would have a load of stone blocks.  Most of the stone block load models I use for my Stone Delving quarry wagons were too long for this Broad Gauge wagon and it was only after a bit of hunting around that I found the stone load model that you see in the pictures.

Then of course I had to mod the wagon's attachment point in its body mesh and set the height correctly.  And part way through I decided that the stone blocks needed to be resting on a couple of timber baulks instead of just sitting on the floor of the wagon.  So I found a single wooden sleeper model and made two new attachment points and adjusted two of them into place.  About this time I was starting to think, 'Whose stupid idea was this anyway?'  But I got there in the end and I'm reasonably pleased with the result.  Not quite a silk purse made from a sow's ear, but better than a poke in the eye.

 

[Northroader]

Now that’s a work of genius, just don’t put too many of those big rocks in, they do weigh very heavy. The best known bg PO wagon was Sully & Co, Bridgwater, one of theirs features in a photo of Swindon dump in 1892. They shipped South Wales coal up the river Parrett and distributed it round a large chunk of Somerset. PO wagons generally were rarer on the broad gauge, just a few were known, I think a BGS journal did something on it.

[Edwardian]

Brilliant, Annie.

[Annie]

Thanks, - I really would have prefered to find a nice single stone block model, but this 5 stone block model was the only one I could find that would fit in the wagon.  I guessed that stone blocks would be a seriously heavy load so I didn't go silly and try fitting two of the 5 stone block models in the wagon despite the fact that they might have just fitted in.  Trainz gives the stone load a weight rating of 6000, - and before you ask I haven't a clue what the unit of measure is, - which is a pretty significant load in the simulator so a long train of these  wagons with loads wouldn't be a great idea.  I only made four which seemed to be enough reality stretching for one day.  And in case you are wondering the stone block load and timber baulks are removable so the wagons can be used empty as well.

 

I really need to do something about a BGS subscription.  The membership secretary has sent me all the details it's just that I haven't done anything about it yet.  That there were some Broad Gauge PO wagons in use is certainly good to know, but I imagine it's not something to go overboard with if they were uncommon.

 

I have a couple of other basic wagon models by the same maker that need to be smartened up with new textures and a couple more that are grey instead of red so I'll continue to mess about with them until I've had enough and feel like I want to go back to working on the layout again.

Edited September 25, 2019 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

And who said rock'n'roll was dead. 

[Annie]

Another case of, 'Will you please move the engine.'  Tantalising glimpses of Broad Gauge wagons seen behind this B&E 4-4-0 saddle tank.  The iron coal wagon is of particular interest to me.

 

[Annie]

Hawthorne class 'Melling' at Truro with the Broad Gauge engine shed in the background.

 

 

So this means that my engine shed should be timber and not stone.  Sometimes finding rare historic photos can be sooooooo annoying.

[Charlie586]

8 hours ago, Annie said:

Another case of, 'Will you please move the engine.'  Tantalising glimpses of Broad Gauge wagons seen behind this B&E 4-4-0 saddle tank.  The iron coal wagon is of particular interest to me.

 

 

Is the open on the right dumb buffered? It looks it to me when I zoom in.

 

I've got this link to a scratchbuild http://lutrainz.com/Broad_Gauge_Sully.html   bookmarked for the Sully wagon in case I ever get round to scratchbuilding one myself.

[Annie]

Yes I think that wagon is a dumb buffered one Charlie.  The engine in the photo is in its final rebuild condition so that places the time period at around 1890 more or less.

I've just ordered issue no 46 of the Railway Archive from Lightmoor Press that has an article written by The Reverend Canon Brian Arman on the B&ER 4-4-0 saddle tanks so hopefully there will be more useful background pictures to be found.

 

The Sully wagon is interesting, but I think it would be well out of area for Truro.  I don't think I could manage to make a replica of the wagon anyway due to not having any suitable wagon meshes.  Does anyone know how common this wagon was as a type on the Broad Gauge?  The Swindon wagon dump photo shows an awful lot of wagons, but it's just about impossible to pick out much detail on most of them.

 

[Northroader]

A Sully wagon wouldn’t really have got down into Cornwall, and the wagon on Swindon tip was a late survivor, as the B&E system had been converted to mixed gauge on the main and standard on the branches quite a few years earlier, so by then standard guage Sully wagons were more common, and in addition I gather in 1892 PO wagons were left at the owners depot rather than getting sent to Swindon. Usually PO wagons are associated with coal traffic, and a lot of coal traffic for Cornwall would be shipped into Hayle from South Wales, then distributed in railway owned wagons. I think there were some PO wagons in the China clay traffic, and I seem to recall a gunpowder wagon from that end?

[Annie]

Waaaay back when I first purchased the TS2009 simulator I built up a layout I called the 'HUGE Uk Layout'.  And it was huge and a lot of it was never really finished off properly, but that didn't matter so much because I only ever ran trains on about a third of it.  It was my first major attempt at layout building and it was an odd layout in that it was never quite sure just where in the Uk it was or what era it belonged to.  Old railway magazines I'd read back when I was a teenager were certainly an influence, but mostly it was a layout where I learned to use the editing and construction tools the simulator had to offer.  I made plenty of mistakes and I got things wrong, but I also learned an awful lot.

 

Moving back into the present day about four months ago I decided to shift my old layout over to the TS2012 simulator.  I removed the problematic never quite finished sections of the layout and joined up the cut off ends of the mainline with dogbone loops disguised with sudden forests where necessary turning my 'HUGE UK Layout' into a 'Not So HUGE Uk Layout' and there my old layout sat and I didn't do much with it after that.

 

Needing a break from attempting to build a prototypical representation of the Cornwall Railway I returned to my old layout yesterday and had a look at it.  With the change over to TS2012 and all the cutting off of the unwanted bit various things were out of place and quite a few adjustments needed to be done here and there so that's what I did.  It was interesting seeing some of my earlier work because the same tendency I have now to adjust and fit things together precisely and neatly was very much in evidence.

 

Basically what the layout is based around is a minor railway in joint alliance with a shipping company named the 'Grand Navigation Joint Railway'.  It runs from a sizeable wharf at Seaside Magna via fairly lengthy single track line of railway to make a junction with the double track mainline at Debton.  And this is where the fun starts because the mainline on the layout changed hands between railway companies and eras several times over the time I was actively working on it.  Debton eventually settled on belonging to the GWR.  A Southern/LSWR section somehow developed before I stopped working on the layout and the now removed sections had a strong NER influence which didn't really fit in at all.

Because I was working with what models were available at the time there are more than a few anachronisms and generic choices rather than what might be strictly correct, but that's Ok.  The 'HUGE Uk Layout' never was a fastidious representation of anywhere and I'm going to keep it like that.

 

Some snaps:  The main station at Seaside Magna.  After trying out a good many repainted second hand engines from all over the British Isles the G.N.Jt.R. became a customer of Sharp Stewart & Co.  This is very much where my obsession with love of 'Sharpies' began.

 

 

The MPD at Seaside Magna.

 

Seaside station.  Seaside is popular with day trippers and campers and it also has a steamer wharf.  There are a lot of ship models on the layout, - possibly too many, but I can live with that.

 

The old wharf station at Walberry.  The large station at a higher level is Walberry Town and belongs to the GWR.

 

Ironbridge.  There is a small station tucked under the bridge piers.  Installing this bridge and getting it adjusted and working correctly took me ages.  The centre section does raise by the way, - not that I do that very often.

 

The G.N.Jt.R. station at Debton.  The town, GWR station and exchange yards/goods yard is in the distance.

 

I hope you enjoyed this visit to my early beginnings with Railway simulators.  I could have showed you more pictures, but I didn't want to horrify bore you too much with my early neophyte railway simulator imaginings. 

 

 

 

[Annie]

One of the members of the creator group I belong to is helping me out with a new weatherboard/spectacle plate for my 'Bogie' class engines.  A new 'Bogie' class engine is going to join those on the layout, - 'Theocritus', - and this is the test engine for the new weatherboard.

With the add of a drawing from Kinnear's 'Railway Machinery' and a certain amount of frowning I made this basic drawing to send off to the helpful group member.  We had a slightly rocky start when he said he didn't know what a weatherboard was, but once we got past that things seem to be fine.  I've been sent a basic rectangle mesh made to the dimensions I worked up from the drawing and it fits    So with that hurdle over it's adding all the shaping and details that comes next.

 

[runs as required]

Interesting that Ironbridge raising section. 

I tried to weigh the raising mechanism against a swing bridge - thinking about it I originally thought the weight of iron greatly outweighed the swing bridge option.

However,  getting the swing bridge to properly engage in  its seating each time in all weathers probably meant a a weight restriction may have been imposed compared to the lift and lower mechanism.

Keep up posting your stimulating virtual world 

dh

 

 

 

Edited September 26, 2019 by runs as required

[Annie]

Thanks RAR.  Up close when it's working those weights are quite massive pieces of kit.  I'm not sure if they are meant to entirely counterbalance the bridge deck, or if they are weighted just sufficiently to take some of the loading off the lifting mechanism.  I'm certainly no bridge engineer even though my layouts seem to feature a lot of bridges. 

The model itself was a bit of a pig to get it to load into the simulator as it had more than a few scripting faults which I had to figure out.  I'm glad I persisted though because it's certainly an impressive sight.

 

Sharpie No.10 in charge of taking a coal train to the goods yard at Debton.  Moving coal away from the wharf at Seaside Magna is these Sharpie 0-6-2T's main job.

 

You can see where I got my liking for coastal railways from.

 

 

The railway enthusiast lady and her bored daughter were one of the first mini scenes I created on this layout.

 

 

The wooden bridge across the river.  Nothing like as impressive as the huge iron lifting bridge on the GWR line.  It has an operating swing bridge section in the middle.  This was about the first bridge I ever did and it's all a bit of a fudge.  More so since I was trying to fit bridge sections together that weren't intended to fit together.

 

 

A long drink for a hard working engine.  Who's that looking out the signal box window?

 

 

 

[Annie]

These G.N.Jt.R. 'Sharpies' are the very first ones I reskinned and modified and while they got better engine spec files, sound files and whistles I didn't fit them with cab interiors or the capacity to have interactive coal and water loading as I've done with my several other modded 'Sharpie' reskins I did later.  Possibly I didn't know how back then, but today they all went into the 'Works' and came out with cab interiors and interactive coal and water loading.

I didn't want to make a wild guess as to coal and water capacity and I've had the feeling for a while that my other 'Sharpies' capacity figures were generic rather than prototypical so I checked what they were here ........

https://www.steamlocomotive.com/locobase.php?country=Great_Britain&wheel=0-6-2&railroad=br

 

This website is a fantastic resource and I first used it when I was building my Hopewood Tramway single driver tank engines.  With the 2-2-2T's I changed out the original 'little engine that could' unstoppable engine spec for one that was much more appropriate and had been written by one of the Trainz engine spec gurus.  However when I came to test the 2-2-2T's they couldn't so much as turn their driving wheels half a revolution before stalling.  On further investigation I found that they were carrying such a weight of coal and water that the track should have collapsed under them.  Once I found the correct water and coal capacity specs for them and edited their config files they were fine and have proven many times over their ability to run local passenger train services on my GER & affiliated imaginary companies layout with their brisk turn of speed and good running characteristics.

Edited September 27, 2019 by Annie
fumble brain

[corneliuslundie]

I can';t remember where I read it but I seem to remember that at the "narrowing" some broad gauge PO wagons were simply pushed off the line near the owner's premises for him to sort out. The owners were not amused.

You can tell which PO wagons have been converted from broad gauge because there is a specific p;late on the solebar - again without looking it up I can't remember what it looks like. There is also a diamond shaped plate for wagons converted from dumb buffers.

I am pretty sure that the Severn & Wye Railway had PO wagons in its broad gauge days as there were numerous collieries in the Forest.

But I can't remember any photos offhand. Certainly there are none in Paar.

Jonathan

[Annie]

I would imagine that while the former Broad Gauge lines were up and running again by the end of the weekend, the disruption to private wagon owners would have been very annoying and frustrating.

 

Inspiring Broad Gauge picture.

 

[Annie]

More turning sow's ears into faux silk purses.

 

The 4 planker makes an adequate goods wagon provided you don't look too hard.  It has three friends with different numbers since I don't like running wagons with identical numbers in a train.  The flat wagon was a strange unfinished looking thing so I plonked a hand powered crane on it which made it look a bit more likely.

 

 

These 5 plank wagons needed so much messing with I was starting to wonder if it was worth it.  The original textures hadn't been fitted correctly so I had to find a work around fudge in order to end up with a decent result.  Like the 4 plankers these are very simple models with little in the way of detailing and what is there is a bit odd.  A coat of paint hides some of the sins and provided I don't look too closely at them they'll do.

 

 

This is called a two plank wagon, but it's more like a one plank wagon and the texture used for it is just an image made up of planks.  The spacing of the planks is critical since they are being asked to do everything and I haven't figured it out to my satisfaction yet.  The ends of the floor planks shouldn't be visible either.  The colour mapping is strange too and the  colour variation on the ends is something I can't do anything about.  If I want to letter and number the wagon I'll have to make up individual texture masks and attach them into place so it's getting to the point where this wagon might find itself on the scrap siding if it annoys me much more.

 

Edited September 28, 2019 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Annie]

 

That battle with the one plank wagon has been won!  I was stuck with the planking texture and couldn't make it work, - then I had a zen moment (No planks).  So I entirely removed the planks from the texture and made it all GWR red.  The wagon floor planks texture is one I made up and I used a coal wagon load mesh to make the floor.  I thought the coal load mesh was flat, but it's not, - it has a slight hump in the middle of it.  It's not wildly noticeable and most of the time these wagons will be carrying a load so it can't be seen.  I will try to find a more suitable flat mesh, but for the meantime what's there will do.

 

I also found that the problem with colour variation in the wagon sides was caused by the wagon having been setup with a shadow mesh that was the wrong size for it.  So that got changed for one the right size and problem solved.

 

And yes I did make some lettering texture masks and fit them into place even though I said I wasn't going to.  This is always a tedious job not helped on this occasion by the fact that the supposedly 'professional' modelmaker who made the wagon hadn't made the right and left hand wagon sides the same distance from the wagon body's centre line so each side had to have its texture masks individually set in place.  But all his stuff is like that so I shouldn't be surprised.

 

Possibly I should weather the wagon sides down a little and do the same with the underframe and brake gear, but not today since I can feel the need to sleep coming on.

Edited September 29, 2019 by Annie
can't spell for toffee

[Annie]

Two snaps from doing some trip working with 'Arete'.  I always enjoy shunting and trip working and I had a lot of fun until I started to get sleepy and had to stop.

I messed about a bit with revising the colour texture on two of the new one plank wagons and even experimented with adding a grime layer texture on one of them.  Definitely an improvement, but I've still got a bit to learn with texture layering.

 

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by Annie
more to say

[Annie]

I was doing quite a bit of shunting yesterday, particularly at Truro and I find in general that there's no better way of finding out if a station layout works or not than by shunting wagons on it.  Truro is not an easy yard to shunt in and I was scratching my head over this since the track layout is very close to being correct.  Then the penny dropped, - the yard is set up for horse shunting.

In the prototype situation there was no need to run around wagons since the horse could go anywhere and wasn't tied to travelling on the rails like a locomotive is.  There is a shunting horse available for Trainz, - only since the model horse is in effect a locomotive it has to always travel between the rails.  There are ways around this by using invisible tracks so it seems that the horse is independent of the rails with some of its going to and fro in a goods yard, but the other problem is that the horse needs to be turned around like a locomotive so it's always pulling forward while working.  Wagon turntables can help with this, - and while Truro has one it's not ideally placed.  So if I was going to start using a shunting horse I would need to put in more wagon turntables, - not to mention more than a few invisible tracks.

I thought about this and decided it was simpler to install a 'not there on the prototype' crossover to give me a useable run around loop handy to the goods yard rather than add in more wagon turntables  that definitely weren't there on the prototype.  Presently I can run around a train of wagons, but only by travelling from one end of Truro station yard to the other and shunting via the passenger platform tracks.  I would think that the Truro stationmaster would have a lot to say about that!

[Annie]

 

Shunting horse.  This is a very old model made by a content creator who died far too young and took most of his 'horse as a locomotive' secrets with him and nobody else has attempted an updated version since then.  The horse is standing on an invisible track that runs to a turning wye attached to the wagon turntable siding and the other end of the track attaches to a siding in the goods yard.  This is all a bit of an experiment as it's a very long time since I last had a horse drawn rail vehicle on a layout.  That was a horse drawn tram which was a lot simpler to operate as compared with trying to shunt with a horse.