Trainz - That's how the publisher spells it

[pbot]

I have been watching some youtube “let’s build” videos related to the Trainz railroad program recently. Coincidentally, I received an email last week that Trainz was on sale for 66% off ($11.90). Less than $12 for an upgraded version? SOLD! I’ve owned several prior versions. It’s fun to mess around with, but I’ve never made much progress in actually building a route. This time might not be any different, but I will give it a shot anyway. This thread will be used to detail the progress as I attempt to build a virtual railroad.

To start, I’m not trying to recreate a real life route for several reasons:

• Difficulty of the build/lack of info
• Railroads that can run on the track

In terms of difficulty, if I try and recreate a real life railroad, then I’ll need to do some detailed research which may or may not have much information available. Also, recreating a real line in some respects limits what I can do, the railroad already built it, I would just be attempting to duplicate what they built.

So, I’m going to create something that I will call “plausibly realistic”. By that I mean, I will attempt to make it look and operate like a real-life railroad, but it will be a fictional setup loosely based on real railroads. Plus, by going the fictional route, I can have multiple industries that are typically spread out over large distances all within this setup. Rather than “just” having a coal route based in West Va/PA/Kentucky, or a paper/logging route based in Maine, or a grain/livestock route out in the Nebraska/Iowa/Kansas areas, I can have all of those things in a more confined space, without running hundreds of miles of track which would take forever and probably crash the game or at least make it run really slow due to the file size and number of elements that would need to be placed to make it look good.

The other reason, is the railroad liveries I will use. By running a fictional based route, I can use whatever liveries I want without it being “unrealistic”. It is similar to using real team names but fictional players in FOF or OOTP, maybe. If I want to have the Chessie System run and interact with something like the Illinois Central, for example, I can. In a ‘real’ railroad that wouldn’t be realistic.

For those that don’t know, there are seven Class I railroads in the US/Canada. Burlington Northern Santa Fe(BNSF), Union Pacific (UP), CSX, Norfolk Southern (NS), Kansas City Southern (KCS), Canadian National (CN), and Canadian Pacific (CP), along with several hundred smaller railroads (“shortlines”) that handle very localized work. Class I's are the big companies that operate thousands of miles of track throughout the country. I will attempt to create a shortline railroad that shares mainline tracks with one or a few Class I railroads. Most likely CSX, NS and CP since I’ll be creating an East coast/Midwest type route.

So that’s the background for this project.

In terms of the actual plan it will likely go something like this:
• Define the route
• Place the tracks and terraform the land
• Run the signaling
• Place objects/texture the terrain
• Setup the scripts for the AI trains to operate on the route

The screenshot is of the first section of placed track, along with a Chessie System loco, for historical purposes. Chessie power will be the default until such time as I find/create a new fictional paintscheme for the as of now un-named shortline railroad.

[pbot]

It seems that shortline railroads typically, in the Trainz world at least, tend to be somewhere in the 10 mile to 50 mile range of track placed. While it might not sound like much, there is a lot of work required to make it look good even for just 10 miles. After working a little bit each night for the past several days, I’ve created a mainline layout that runs for approximately 18 miles. Seems like that will be long enough to keep it fairly active, but not so long that my computer will bog down, or just be too much to do to make it look good.

Every time I open up the program and start working on the layout, I think of things to modify. I re-worked several portions of the mainline track a couple of times, but I think the layout adjustments I made last night have that part fairly well set. I’m sure I’ll make adjustments as the details get placed, as well as working on terraforming the land so it isn’t pancake flat, like when you first start.

The screenshot in the first post shows the default flat ground, it is gray with yellow and dark gray lines to help with measurements and placement of scenery objects. Eventually that will all get painted with textures in an attempt to make it look real. I am a ways away from that right now. Until the terraforming is complete I don’t want to spend too much time placing ground textures as they may not fit if I decide to change the look of the geography.

As I mentioned above, the mainline is currently about 18 miles. Next up will be generating the branch lines that Fictional Railroad Inc will operate. The mainline is used to get from one branchline to another as well as to provide location and access to interchange railcars with the Class I’s. Think of the branchlines as the spur lines from the mainline that are used to get to industrial parks, coal mines, cement plants, etc.

The “plan” is to have the eastern edge of the map be mountainous and then transition into flatlands/plains as the tracks head west. So things like coal mines, lumber forests will be placed mostly on the east side of the map, while industries that consume those products will be more centrally or westerly located. One feature that seems to be new from the last version I used is that industries need raw materials to function, so a milk processing plant needs inbound shipments of milk to be delivered, and then afterwards it will be able to load boxcars with milk, yogurt, ice cream and other dairy based items. That may have been there before, but I never noticed if it was.

The youtube channel I’ve been watching has a setup in which all industries are supplied with raw materials from elsewhere on the map, and the output from one industry supplys another, it is totally self contained. Not sure if I’ll be able to get to that level of detail.

As this progresses, I'll add more screenshots to show what things look like. There isn't too much to look at right now. Once I'm reasonably confident the route is "set" it will be time to generate an overall map of the layout. Both to give any readers a better idea of the route, as well as to help my planning. Right now I'm just kind of winging it.

[pbot]

Spent some time setting the elevation through the eastern mountain area. The setup looked pretty good with some challenging 3-5% grades in the area. Then I downloaded a couple of user made maps just to see what other people had created. I noticed on all of the maps, the actual paths of the railway were pretty flat, typically grades were less than 1%.

Hmmm.

A bit of interwebs research showed me that a typical mainline route in the US has grades of.....less than 1%, and rarely more than 2.2%.

D'oh!

So, I saved the route as a new map and then proceeded to flatten the terrain on version 2. I will rework the grade to be no more than about 1.5-2% throughout the route.

[Critch]

I'd never got past the tutorial in Trainz, mainly because I found it confusing and like to be spoon-fed. I'd end up going for Train Simulator instead because it's simple and pretty, if shallow and boring.

I've reinstalled Trainz now (A New Era version), made it through the tutorials, so I'll be following along and looking to be inspired to create my own route.

[pbot]

Originally Posted by Critch

I'd never got past the tutorial in Trainz, mainly because I found it confusing and like to be spoon-fed. I'd end up going for Train Simulator instead because it's simple and pretty, if shallow and boring.

I've reinstalled Trainz now (A New Era version), made it through the tutorials, so I'll be following along and looking to be inspired to create my own route.

I've never tried the tutorials, maybe I should.

Reworked the layout once more. Instead of 18ish miles of mainline track with branchline offshoots, I decided to make the entire 18 miles the branchline. Then I built a 4-5 mile main line that will run along the edge of a portion of the map, and merge with the shortline track over near the yard at the west end of the map.

Looking east over the west end yard:


Don't know if that is realistic, but it makes sense to me that the fictional railroad would have contiguous track to all of the industries they serve as opposed to leasing track rights from a class I to get to the various offshoot tracks.

After the mainline tracks head east out of the yard it winds around and eventually crosses over the shortline as shown in the next shot.



Final shot is of the crossing of the mainline back over the short line. Off to the right will be at least one industry location. Haven't decided what that will be just yet.



These three screenshots take place within about a 3 mile stretch. Lots of territory to cover beyond these. This is just what I've worked on for generating terrain. The route is going to be relatively flat, but I'll build up the terrain on the sides in an attempt to give it some depth. Most of the route is one baseboard wide,so without the elevated edges, you would be able to see the edge in a lot of spots.

So, the shortline will be the 18 miles of track, plus local branches. The mainline will run along the edges of the map and be visible from the shortline track in certain spots. Via the use of portals, I will setup the session so that various trains are generated on the mainline track and will run along the mainline. Hopefully some will be setup so they deliver cars to the western yard, while others will just run straight through to the other end of the mainline. The thought is that the mainline will be the "extras" in the scene, and the focus will be on operating the shortline itself.

[pbot]

Work continues on the layout. I've added a few more branch/spur lines off of the primary shortline track. At this point I've got a coal mine, steel mill, grain elevator and papermill placed. Have quite a bit of work to do on each of them to make them look real. Right now, it is just basic building placement, and some access track established, so they don't look all that good at the moment.

Since my son wants to start making youtube videos, he thinks he is going to be a Minecraft star, seemed like a good idea to download some video capture software and some free trials of video creation programs. As a test, I created a video of the mainline track. It starts with the yard at the west end of the map and shows several points along the way as it heads east up the grade until the end. The video camera work, and editing are pretty rough, this is more a proof of concept as far as creating a youtube video than anything else. It does give a little sense of the route though. And, since I had my pc sound turned really low, I didn't realize the bells on the engine were ringing the entire time. So I just added a free youtube song as a replacement soundtrack instead of listening to locomotive bells for 3+ minutes.

Test Run - YouTube

[pbot]

No pictures or anything for this brief update. Have been busy with work and stuff, so time has been limited. I've made some progress, but it is more of the boring, behind the scenes type stuff.

First, finally figured out how to make rail crossings work so that when the train rolls through the crossing the cars on the streets actually stop instead of passing through the train like it is a ghost. Couldn't find a good tutorial on youtube for the longest time, and after lots of trial and mostly error I finally found one that semi-explained the last thing I was doing wrong. Of course, a couple days after that breakthrough someone posted a really good tutorial that would've saved me quite a bit of trial/error time. D'oh!

Second, I seem to have multi-industry tracks working now. This means I can place a specialized section of track anywhere and tell it to load or unload a rail car pretty much with whatever product I want. Before this, I could only place industries that had that capability built in. And then, it would only load/unload whatever product(s) that were built in to the industry. So, while it makes sense to load coal at a coal mine, factories - for example - were limited to whatever products were already established. If I wanted to ship car batteries from a factory to a warehouse, I could only do that if I found a downloadable factory that was already configured to ship batteries, and a warehouse was setup to unload batteries. Now I can place a generic factory and warehouse on the map and tell the factory to ship batteries and the warehouse to unload them.

This means I can have a bunch of self-sufficient industries on the map. Load crude oil from an ocean tanker and ship the crude to a refinery. The refinery then processes the crude and will ship diesel fuel, or gasoline, etc to a storage tank terminal. Pickup a load of cattle at a ranch, take them to a rendering plant and then ship out frozen beef to a refrigerated warehouse, etc.