Annie

This is Rathtyen as it originally was before I went through and deleted everything that looked a poor match for South Wales in the 1930s. It had 1960s error era buildings and strange Soviet brutalist tenements and factories for heaven's sake. The station itself looked like nothing the GWR ever built so that got cleared down to platform level. I was not looking forward to this as Rathtyen is the biggest station on Tristyn & District and with the town it covers a considerable area. At least now I can give Rathtyen a proper goods yard, a decent station and some rail served industries which will be a major improvement.

Steve was planning on doing some of the other steam railmotor variants, but the difficulties he had with this one has made him put the project on hold until he can figure out a better way of assembling the body meshes. It certainly is a lovely model and it always makes me smile to see it running.

I took Steve Flanders beautiful steam railcar out for a run this morning. It's constructed from layered meshes similar to the classic method of constructing panelled coaches from cardboard that's been treated with shellac and I know that Steve had quite the struggle to get it to fit together.

I haven't forgotten about my pre-grouping session for 'Tristyn in Winter'. Tristyn is a 1930s layout, but that doesn't mean that I can't run my older GWR engines about all over it if I want to.

45xx No.4553 at Daere. I have a collection of 45xx's by Paulz Trainz dating from Trainz TS2004 days. They have been much fettled and updated and are nice runners. The ones that I have on Tristyn have been borrowed from my Penzance to Camborne and Branches layout, but if you won't tell anyone I won't either. With the 48xx's now largely sorted with their schedules I'm starting to consider how the other longer distance passenger services should be run.

I find myself wondering if that's what the locomotive's creator had in mind. It would solve the problem of someone saying number 14xx didn't look like that. Fortunately there was only No. 1483 that need to be captured and taken away for re-education. There's still the issue of which 48xx's had top feed on their boilers and which ones didn't, but I have decided that ignorance might be the best policy. My own memory of high school maths Jim was that I was completely terrible at it. 😧 Once things got beyond basic tangible arithmetic I was completely lost.

The return of the 48xx's. I've been able to figure out how to make the number assigning script for these engines work with a 48 prefix instead of a 14 prefix. I also discovered that with the way it was set up it was capable of taking the numbering past the 75 members of the class and into imaginary numbering territory. So I fixed that as well. I now have four autotrain capable 48xx's on 'Tristyn in Winter' and i think that should be enough to handle the branchline traffic.

True enough Mike, - the things I've learned about through railway modelling are downright amazing. As usual Wikipedia was useful to give me an idea of what it was all about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_hearth_furnace

Yes it has. A fully animated horse was made a good few years ago by a very clever digital modeller for Trainz. Unfortunately they are no longer with us and they took the secret of its construction and scripting with them when they departed this world and no-one has attempted making one since. I've made use of the horse model from time to time to shunt sidings when I want something of a challenge and it certainly works just fine. It's been used to draw carts on specially adapted roads as well as horse drawn trams. Recently a friend devised a way of creating a horse drawn tramway for a stone quarry using this same horse.

And after further rebuilding and frowning at things I can now tell you that Daere Steel Co. uses an open hearth furnace so is a much smaller kind of operation compared to steelworks that use blast furnaces. One advantage with rearranging the furniture with considering different steel making techniques and discovering that there was an open hearth furnace model available for Trainz that I could use is that I was able to steal some more space for sidings and make a much better job of it.

I've just had a hunt about in my TANE installation and sure enough I've still got a copy of a portion of a massive Uk layout called 'A Moment in Time' that I ran trains all over when I first purchased TS2009 World Builder Edition. The original layout was HUGE and even makes Tristyn in Winter look small, - and I don't think that I ever managed to visit every industry or station on 'A Moment in Time'. However the piece that I lifted out from it made for a more attractive proposition as a layout and I had a lot of fun with it. And one of the industries that it did have was a steelworks, - which I dubbed 'the environmental disaster area'. Now if that was beside the tracks at Daere I might believe it, - but with what is there now at Daere, - sorry no.

Thanks Mike. I'd heard about the brown painted engines before, but it was only this past week while reading up on autotrains that I came across the mention of the fully encased engines. I'd not see a picture of one though until this one you've posted here now. It's almost like an upmarket GER C53 tram engine in some ways. Apparently they weren't very popular with the engine crews, - though I must agree that they would make an interesting model. Thanks again Mike. Yes that is very much the kind of thing I thought Daere Steel Co should be looking like even though I don't know what half of all that is for. There are a fairly good selection of steelworks type buildings available in Trainz, but trying to fit them onto the small patch of ground in some kind of plausible shape or form at Daere is pretty much a lost cause. If i was going to the trouble of replicating something like Port Talbot I would need to add a whole new baseboard onto the side of the layout and even then I think I would be scratching for enough space to do it all justice. No I think Daere Steel Co might find itself being renamed to Daere Engineering Co which would be a whole lot more believable.

Temperatures were horribly hot here today at 33 degrees so the only answer to that was to play Trainz in the snow. I'd tidied up the steelworks at Daere a bit even though I haven't much of a clue as to what a steelworks should look like. I'd also sorted out the sidings so that they could actually be shunted and added in an interactive unloading track so that coal could be delivered. All of which led me to attempting to figure out a schedule for getting coal to Daere Steel Co. I know it's small for a steelworks and the sidings are hardly extensive, but that's because it was originally jammed in place right beside the edge of the layout board with only enough room for Daere station to fit in next to it. The siding were wonderfully puzzley to shunt with only really enough room for the five 20 ton wagons to be maneuvered about once the brake van was dropped off. I normally like shunting puzzles, but on this occasion I started to wonder if I'd overdone it a bit. Using a 56xx as a shunter wasn't the best with the limited space, but once I find where i archived away my Peckett K's one of those will be on the job instead.

I know the North Eastern Railway made use of long motor trains of several coaches for some passenger services, but in the GWR's use of autocoaches they were mainly providing an easily managed passenger service to branchlines where the numbers of daily passengers were relatively small. Passenger services around Plymouth where up to four autocoaches were used in trains don't seem to have been copied elsewhere on the GWR system. The award for the worst motor train control system would have to go the Great Eastern's less than best wire and string attempt that barely ever worked and was largely ignored by GER crews who in later years prefered to use the whistle to signal to one another instead.

I think that was the limitation with the autocoaches. Any more than two of them coupled together and the linkages had so much play that it became impossible to operate the regulator effectively. I have run the autocoaches on Tristyn in pairs, either trailing or leading as required, but for working into the bay platforms at Branwyn and Gwenadwy they seem to do better with the engine in the middle.

Thanks Adrian, - that Broad Gauge 3501 class tank engine is absolutely amazing. The strange thing is though I've only just discovered where I could obtain an ex-Cardiff Railways 155 tank engine for Trainz and there's this webpage shown to me of a clever chap making one.

After doing some further reading about GWR Autocoaches (thanks Wikipedia) I decided to try out the piggy locomotive in the middle method of operating two autocoaches in company with my naughty now well behaved 14xx's. According to Wikipedia suburban services around Plymouth often used four autocoaches with the locomotive in the middle, but that might be going a bit far for local passenger services in Tristyn & District. On my early BR ex-LNWR Borders layout I ran motor train services with up to four coaches mostly because I could, but I think I'm a bit more sensible with my train sets now. Autocoaches/Driving Trailers/Motor Train Coaches & etc need to be set up differently to ordinary passenger coaches in Trainz for them to work properly and the two coach sets definitely function better with interactive passenger platforms with the piggy locomotive in the middle. That's not an officially approved GWR tie!! This particular driver figure first started out as a bus driver for a driveable Daimler bus and he can now be found with his bold red tie driving all manner of vehicles in Trainz. That windscreen wiper works by the way. A very clever piece of animation. Andy Smith was the very clever creator behind this autocoach and many other coaches and animated objects for Trainz. Sad to say he was taken from this world far too soon leaving behind an incredible legacy and we can only wonder what else he might have achieved had he lived longer.

A snap taken at Gwenadwy of one of my latest finds for Trainz in Winter. A basic model of a GWR pedestal water tower has been available for Trainz ever since the early days of the simulator, but this model complete with ice fighting heater stove made by George Bales for TS2009 had somehow evaded my attention. Gwenadwy is a junction station and to my mind at least is a station of some importance, but somehow it ended up being a not very well done after thought with minimal railway infrastructure.

What a fascinating picture, - thanks very much Ed and a Happy New Year to you for 2024. 😁

My intentions with tidying up 'Tristyn in Winter' is not to make a super finescale job of it, but instead to retain its basic charm. The original Tristyn had its origins in TS2009 and much of the ideas behind Trainz in those days was about being able to create a digital model railway rather than a living breathing digital representation of reality which is where Trainz is going at present. In those early days of Trainz some of the creator group guys made a kitset of basic parts that could be used to create towns. In many ways the design owed much to children's building blocks. Here's me assembling a block of shops at Gwenadwy. The body of the shops is one block, a roof to fit the block is another. Then there's a variety of chimneys and chimney pots. I had no end of fun with the chimney pots placing them in a random mix on top of the chimneys. I almost got a bit carried away with it and started to put chimney pots on other buildings, but I managed to overcome that silly impulse before it ran away with me. Unfortunately only one type of chimney pot had a smoke generator, but I think it worked out Ok despite that.

I've had a look at the 14xx's magic numbering system that allows it to be given the number of any one of the 75 14xx's that were built and I think it's highly possible to change it to work with the 4800 class numbers instead.

This is the 'shirtbutton' 14xx's partner in crime. I also had a look at the BR black liveried version as well as it is by the same maker. All three share the same body with the only difference being the livery they are wearing. They were made some time ago for Trainz TS2009 by a gentleman named George Bales who also made a fair number of other post-Grouping GWR engines in both GWR and BR liveries around the same time. I have heard some criticism that his engines aren't always completely accurate, but there's no denying the attention to detail that he put into them. I don't know what sources of information he used and while he is a member of the creator group I belong to I don't know him well enough to ask. Unfortunately due to ill health he is no longer making locomotive models for Trainz which is a great loss to the Uk Trainz community. I was reading somewhere recently that red lamps persisted on the GWR for some time after the official change over to white lamps, - so hedging bets with both red and white lamps on engines always makes me smile.

A film that I must watch again sometime soon (Checks stocks of heavy duty tissues). A scruffy little 14xx that was sent off to find their shirtbuttons. I'm not going to stand for any more engines straying off into the 1940s and they are going to have to learn to smarten themselves up and dress properly. Now I just need to catch up with that Dukedog and sort it out.

Wonderful, - thank you for making me smile this morning.

I only went to have a look at a trackwork problem at the big timber merchants at Gwenadwy and ended up rebuilding the station, installing a goods shed, tidying up the town and completely rebuilding the timber merchant's premises as well. Mind you it did need it as there was already a long 'To-Do' list for Gwenadwy, but at least most of it is done now. Taking snaps of Gwenadwy at close of play are certainly useful as looking at them now i can see a few small things that needed finishing off. Somehow while doing all this I managed not to disturb this young couple who only had eyes for each other.