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

[Annie]

A snap I took yesterday while messing about with my mid-19th century models.  The well tank is a Hurst, which is a somewhat obscure little locomotive, but despite that I have several and I like them.

 

[Edwardian]

What a wonderful train!

[Annie]

I decided to give the double Crampton a run on my Cairnrigg to Balessie layout. 

Paul of Paulz Trainz had a major hard drive failure some time ago and he lost many of his completed Trainz files.  When I asked him about the double Crampton he said that he didn't have the completed file anymore but he did have a folder of WIP bits and pieces that I could have.  It was a bit of a puzzle, but in the end I was able to assemble a double Crampton from all the bits. 

The model is still set up with older versions of sound files and engine spec as well as the original smoke and steam animations so I was impressed with how well it coped with running in TRS22.  I'll do the usual fettling I do with old Trainz locomotives and then it can become a regular part of the daily running schedule.

 

Sparrowcam was acting up when I was recording the video so I ended up having to cut out the glitchy bits which made the video clips a lot shorter than what I wanted.

 

 

 

Edited May 25, 2022 by Annie
fumble brain

[MikeOxon]

On 24/05/2022 at 20:43, Oscillation said:

I came across accidently what must be the strangest Crampton Locomotive I’ve ever seen, compared to the double Crampton!

 

 

Recently, I wrote in the Imaginary Locomotives thread "a Crampton Dragster - now that would be something"

 

I had no idea that such a thing had existed - the sloped exhaust pipe looks just the thing 🙂

 

Mike

[Annie]

Night time Cheer Up Picture:  Corpusty Station M&GNJR.

 

[Compound2632]

6 minutes ago, Annie said:

Corpusty Station M&GNJR.

 

With its four end pillars and door set lower than the side rail, I believe that is a Great Northern cattle wagon, vide P. Tatlow, LNER Wagons Vol. 1, p. 78.

[Annie]

20 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

With its four end pillars and door set lower than the side rail, I believe that is a Great Northern cattle wagon, vide P. Tatlow, LNER Wagons Vol. 1, p. 78.

Nothing gets past the eagle eye of wagon detective Stephen Lea.  Thanks for the ID 🙂

[Regularity]

21 minutes ago, Annie said:

Thanks for the ID

When do we get ego and superego? ;)

[Compound2632]

11 minutes ago, Regularity said:

ego

 

 

12 minutes ago, Regularity said:

and superego?

 

[Edwardian]

Stephen's just upset at the thought you need large locomotives to travel north from London 😉

[Compound2632]

9 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Stephen's just upset at the thought you need large locomotives to travel north from London 😉

 

Quite so:

 

[Hroth]

4 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Quite so:

 

 

Oooohhhh!!!!

 

A Webbs Wonder!!!  :-)

 

Makes it sound like a lettuce, I know...

 

 

[Regularity]

Was there ever a Webb engine with the name “Lettis” or similar?

[Compound2632]

25 minutes ago, Hroth said:

Oooohhhh!!!!

 

A Webbs Wonder!!!  :-)

 

To be specific, this is Teutonic 2-2-2-0 No. 1304 Jeanie Deans on the 2pm "Corridor" - the premier train of the Premier Line.

 

20 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Was there ever a Webb engine with the name “Lettis” or similar?

 

Now you wouldn't expect me not to have J. Goodman, L&NWR Locomotive Names (RCTS, 2002) would you?

 

I can confirm that among all the weird and wonderful names bestowed upon LNWR locomotives, not one alluded to a salad vegetable. The nearest approach was perhaps Alfred the Great class 4-4-0 No. 1967 Cressy of 1903, although this seems to have been named for the cruiser HMS Cressy of 1899.

[Annie]

Peckett K's at Ravenscraig mine on 'Dintdale Road', - a newly built layout I've been helping to test and troubleshoot before it's uploaded to the DLS.  The Pecketts seriously need their steam and smoke animations upgrading, but considering that they're elderly TS2004 models they aren't doing too badly.  Testing 'Dintdale Road' has been the perfect excuse for me to give my older models from 'up Norf' a bit of a runabout.

 

 

 

 

W.Worsdell's class L (J73) descending the gradient on the mineral branch.  Another elderly Trainz model from my collection being given a chance to blow the cobwebs out.

 

Edited May 28, 2022 by Annie
fumble brain

[Annie]

Another snap taken on 'Dintdale Road'.  Resistance is useless.

 

[Regularity]

57 minutes ago, Annie said:

Dintdale

Did someone mention “Dinsdale Piranha”? ;)

[Annie]

5 hours ago, Regularity said:

Did someone mention “Dinsdale Piranha”? ;)

?????????????  🤨

[Annie]

After a spot of fitting and fettling in the mining Co's workshops the Pecketts demonstrate their new cylinder draincocks 

 

 

Dint has an end-on junction with two branchlines, - one with a coal mine and the other with lime kilns and a quarry so there's a good sized set of holding and sort sidings at Dint.  All of which makes for lots of fun with shunting.

 

 

These ex-NER class 'E' (J71) 0-6-0T's are the best shunting engines I've got in my collection of older Trainz models.  They really are a delight to drive when there's a lot of wagons to sort and shift.  Good traction and acceleration and easy and quick to reverse as well. Edit:  The brake van attached to No.811 is an amusing thing.  It has a goods guard figure with a number of scripted attachment points so he moves from one van verandah to the other and in and out of the brake van cabin depending on the direction of the simulator's POV.

 

 

Ex-NER class 'O' (G5) with a motortrain set on the Leatherhead quarry branch.

 

 

Edited May 28, 2022 by Annie
More words needed.

[Edwardian]

25 minutes ago, Annie said:

?????????????  🤨

 

 

[Edwardian]

And now for something completely different; Simon on day release ...

 

 

[MikeOxon]

10 hours ago, Annie said:

After a spot of fitting and fettling in the mining Co's workshops the Pecketts demonstrate their new cylinder draincocks ..........

I'm impressed by the 'softer' lighting and contrast of the scenery - it greatly improves the appearance of your screen shots.  The motortrain in the cutting looks wonderful 😀

 

Mike

[Edwardian]

The scenic setting is superb and really sets off the trains.  All things much harder to achieve with the space and time available to the physical modeller, so a real strength of the virtual format. 

 

Very lovely pictures.

[Annie]

5 hours ago, MikeOxon said:

I'm impressed by the 'softer' lighting and contrast of the scenery - it greatly improves the appearance of your screen shots.  The motortrain in the cutting looks wonderful 😀

 

Mike

 

5 hours ago, Edwardian said:

The scenic setting is superb and really sets off the trains.  All things much harder to achieve with the space and time available to the physical modeller, so a real strength of the virtual format. 

 

Very lovely pictures.

Thanks very much.  After having endless problems with trying to get TRS22 working properly on my computer I went back to using TS2019 SP1, - which is the first retail update version after TS2019 was released a couple of years ago.  The next  lot of SP updates seemed to do little else except break scripting, stop things working and cause further bugs as N3V tried to push the boundaries into higher levels of digital sophistication until they hit SP5 which sort of mostly nearly fixed things.  Aaaaand then came TRS22 which actually and amazingly worked without any problems, but needed more computer resources to run.

My old dual quad core processor Xeon computer was doing what is called 'bottlenecking' in the face of the sheer volume of data TRS22 was pushing at it.  I know its electronic architecture is old and no longer cutting edge, but it's still not what you'd call a wimpy computer.  At first I thought something terrible had gone wrong with it when I saw the performance graphs in Windows Task Manager, but now I'm running TS2019 SP1 again it's running just fine again.  

 

I do wonder if because things were buggy and bad with TS2019 'updates' for so long that when something turned up that wasn't a buggy mess (TRS22) we all thought it must be better.  My only real regret is that I failed to make and keep a backup copy of the original first retail release of TS2019.  The SP1 version is Ok though, - it has an annoying awkward issue with its menus, - but I can live with that because it basically does what it says on the tin and doesn't get too clever about itself.  It's just a pity that I've done so much work on my layouts in the later versions that I can't transfer back into the SP1 version.  I can archive them though and when I buy myself a more cutting edge computer in a year or so I can come back to them.

 

It is pretty darn good to have a working trainset again though and I spend most of yesterday shunting and trip working all over 'Dintdale Road' until I finally had to give it up and go to sleep.  'Dintdale' Road' is an amazing layout and Andy (its creator) has really done some lovely work with building it.  It was a real privilege to be asked to help out with the final testing and troubleshooting before it was made available to the Trainz community.

I've noticed that since I started working on the 'Dintdale Road' project and I blew the dust off this older version of Trainz that my fatigue issues are bothering me less and that the black dog that was starting to circle around isn't there anymore.  I really did think for a while there that I'd gone and messed up everything and since my Trainz hobby is a major part of me being able to cope with living in  the end times this crazy plague planet world of ours I wasn't very happy about things at all.

 

 

One of the set piece trains issued by the portals on 'Dintdale Road' is this ex-GNoS 4-4-0 in charge of a cattle train.  Most of the other set piece trains stay out on the mainline, but this lovely old engine finds its way onto the branchlines that I like to inhabit, runs its schedule in a polite and inoffensive way and leaves again. 

Dintdale Road itself is the junction station on the mainline with the mainline beginning and ending in portals off and away somewhere amongst the hills.  The wonderfully long and rambling single track branchline out to Dint is to my mind the best part of the whole layout and with Dint being a junction itself for two smaller branchlines is the icing on the cake.

 

[Annie]

(Please check my post on the previous page for additional recent musings and ramblings)

Morning Signal Cheer Up Picture.  An early version of the Pheasant Street crossing signal of the Vinegar Works Line, Worcester, with two arms controlling rail traffic and a single arm controlling road traffic, all carried on a slotted wooden post. (Shamelessly borrowed from the Didcot Railway Centre)

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by Annie
More words needed.