Hello traction friendsIt’s time to lift the lid at least a bit. As construction teams are about to complete laying track and will soon begin re-installing interactive objects, the time is right to give you a few first impressions from the now re-vamped “Mountain Electric” or “MountE” route. The MountE is based on the default Europe2 route (Orient Express route) but will – pending approval – also include some additional industries & spurs introduced by Kevin Lera for his “Europe3” or Spanish modern day interpretation of the old Europe2Some of you may recall my initial post about three months ago (it is in the fora, at http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/DCForumID3/19876.html), and it’s my pleasure today to reveal the curtain and brief you in on what the current status of the project is.
The car barn at the terminal in Stanton houses some MP54sOver the past two months or so, the route itself has undergone considerable re-construction. Upon removing all interactive objects (to allow for safely making changes to the .tdb and .rdb files), the good news today is that the MountE will actually be a system of, lets call it, two and a half routes in one. 
Got Milk? Why not ship it with the afternoon train? There's an express baggage compartment in that motor, too.Apart from the 63 main line – the actual “MountE” – the route will include a roughly parallel interurban route of 18 miles in length on the lower end of the route, down in the valley floor, plus (that is the ½ of the 2 ½ routes) a rudimentary urban trolley network of four 1-2 mile branches in the terminal city in said valley. As suggested in the initial post, I decided to have the route set-up for 7.2 metre wires which has the entire system geared to give the users of East Coast motors and other juicers with NEC wire height some different terrain to run on...
NALW's AEM7s head a few AmCans cross over the Bridge at Landeck - ehm Land's Bend that is...What changes does the MountE bring from the default “Europe2” version?Being a ficticious route, I took the liberty to do some modifications to the track. So the actual MountE route (63 miles which used to run from Innsbruck via Landeck to St. Anton in the default Europe2 and which now run from Bridgeport via Land’s Bend to Stanton) stands as follows:1.1) The route has received reversal wyes at both ends and five intermediate terminals, one of which is adopted from the track layout of Kevin Lera’s “Europe3” route, i.e. his interpretation of the route as modern day Spanish diesel route, and thus still pending his approval to be included into the MountE as well.
1.2) At the lower terminal of Bridgeport, a small transfer yard allows the MountE to connect to “the rest of the world”, but given the mountaineous nature of the Mount E, the tracks of the transfer yard will only accept freight trains of ca. up to 1/3 of a mile in length (I know that may sound disappointing to some of you, but lets speak about train length & weight again once you’ve managed to get one of these to the top, ok?)
No night ban on blowing the horn on the MountE...1.3) A fair number of grade crossing have been added for you Captain Hornblowers out there.
1.4) Engine houses at Bridgeport, Land’s Bend and Stanton allow you to start or end your assignment in dignity by storing the motor before heading of for drinking or releasing that cup of coffee.
Two P-Motors shunt the afternoon oil train into the unloading dock at Land's Bend. Can you smell the warm oil from the uphill run!1.5) Some additional industries have been added at various locations en-route. This includes two industries and one short branch line that is again based on Kevin Lera’s version of the route. The branch line which goes to the opposite side of the valley at Land’s Bend (ca. mile 17 on the original route) has been extended by ca. 6 miles to climb to a remote industrial area – thanks to Rich Garber for the various Watt Cart & Wheel Buildings here” – with a small “time safer” style shunting yard that has some regular freight traffic going its way. 
Williamette 2100 on a test run to the Watt Cart & Wheel. Will work even swifter once the 23ft panto has arrived 1.6) The infamous “deadly switch” inbetween Schonwies and Landeck on the original route (you know, the one which takes you on the dead end spur in the Landeck tunnel when you take it in the default position when running uphill) has been rebuilt to now connect to the “good track” in its default setting.
Default AmCan & HHP8 on the double track section signposted for 80 mph.1.7) One or two of the stops in the lower part of the valley have been eliminated as they were really close by each other, and the region is now served by the interurban which needed an economical reason to remain in service.
1.8) The main terminal at Bridgeport has been rebuilt with a simplified track layout, that now also allows you to uncouple from your train and run the engine around it (used to be all dead-end tracks before).
1.9) An interchange track was included at the terminal area, to allow the exchange of freight cars with the interurban route.
1.10) Speed limits, trackside signs etc. will all been changed to mph.
1.11) The scenery items are almost completely exchanged with buildings and objects which have a North American flavour to it. The use of various repaints of the default “resiblock.s” from the USA1 route allowed me to built complete cities which are relatively friendly on frame rates and still give a certain depth to the scenery.
L&PS 2 on the interurban near the terminal at PriestvilleThe Interurban route covers the 15 or so miles from Bridgeport to Priestville (which was Pfaffenhofen in the default Europe2 route). After some 2 miles of streetside running from the station square in Bridgeport to the city limits, it first serves a number of suburbs with small industries – among them a sugar mill which has a spur that only connects to the interurban. After about half of the route, the interurban runs first along some farmland and country roads, before entering the more forested areas. Upon approaching Priestville, the track splits into an “old route” to the MountE terminal in downtown Priestville, which also serves a complex of resorts in the woods, before it winds down into town through the “Bridgeport S” famous among local virtual RR foamers. The new route runs straight through the forset into the residential areas of Bridgeport before terminating in the towns historic center. 
Oregon 55 Beta with 23ft wire negotiates the "Priestville S"The trolley system in the city of Bridgeport is made up of a total of four branches of ca. 1-2 miles in length each which rather serve to host some AI trolley traffic (provided I get signalling to work appropriately), but in explore mode, you’ll have seen it all in about 30 minutes at the maximum. That’s why I only count that as ½ of the 2 ½ routes system…
Another Beta motor that had no problems pulling his 7 freight cars up and down the short but steep grades: L1 Boxcab, c Wayne Campbell. Nice powerful baby, btw, Wayne!In detail, the trolley and interurban track includes:
2.1) A total of 13 wyes (nine of them only negotiable by trolley cars that go through the tight 30 metre turns, four also accepting larger equipment).
2.2) A transfer track to the MountE and via that to the rest of the world, to have a good excuse how a specific car made it onto the Interurban.
2.3) A mix of streetside running (double track) in the towns and cities, and single track right-of-way on the overland sections of the interurban.
The OE 55 streetrunning in the downtown of "Bridgeport"2.4) Car barns in the city of Bridgeport and Priestville to properly park your equipment before – see above
2.5) A few industries that receive occasional freight cars: A sugar mill with small yard, a destillery, a sawmill, a seedstore, the hotel complex etc.
Wayne Campbell's E1 Boxmotor (also Beta) at the spur of a local seedstore...
...and switching Boxcars at the Sugar Mill. Somewhere.2.6) All sidings on the interurban are built in a way which lets an arriving car enter via the default straight path of a switch, and leave it via the diverging track at the end (or in other words: trolleys automatically take the right track when the switches remain untouched)
2.7) A number of flag-stops along the way, all of them properly announced by a stop-ahead warning sign for the new wattmen on the block
2.8) Some variety in the track layout, by including occasional spurs and fly-overs at sidings, to avoid too much stereotypic sidings.
2.9) Some short but vicious grades will keep you alert, especially when shuttling around a string of freight cars. Be on guard whenever an over- or undepass takes the interurban over/under the MtE.Q: Will it be released? And what is the timetable?The ultiamte goal is of course a release, pending the few still open ok’s of involved third authors. But before it can be released, there are some issues which will take another 6-8 weeks (optimistic guess):
- Interactive track objects (track sounds, grade crossings, signals, siding and platform markers, speed limits, mileposts, hazards) need to be re-built into the route (their previous deletion was necessary, otherwise the track could not be changed to the extent in question here).
- All these items, especially the signalling, need to be tested throughoutly.
L&PS 2 with pilot 1 (Beta, again) at the terminal wye near the cathedral of Bridgeport- Some basic activities should be drafted to let you make good use of the route.
- These activities need to be tested. Yes, throughoutly, you guessed right.
- Input from these various tests needs to be included into an alpha version of the route.
- Parallely, some scenery items need to be updated, for example many buildings still lack a separate night texture – and having that large city all dark at night is a ghostly sight…
- The entire route needs to be compressed with Route Riter, with all non-implemented scenery details that are now still in the .ref file and the Shapes and Textures folder needing to be identified and deleted (you don’t want to download 300 MB half of which was not even used in the route).
- Some additional rolling stock needs to be custom-repainted or updated with newer versions before it is ready for release together with the route.So you guys see the list of to-do’s is still very long, and on second thought I think it will not be before christmas that anything is ready. Actually, I think the christmas break will be when I do finalize things… Therefore, thank you for you patience!Lukas a.k.a SwissieEdit: Most screenshots from a Win98 Laptop which serves me to really test framerates. Max in open terrain 14, droping to 5 in dense scenery, and 3 when maxed out and some otherwise hidden (ESD Detail level 10 or 9) frame rate eaters among the buildings slow the system down further.
Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), dvdhoven, Nov-17-03, 02:04 PM, (1) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), mrmike, Nov-17-03, 04:48 PM, (2) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), stephenburr, Nov-17-03, 05:17 PM, (3) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), Tim Frost, Nov-17-03, 05:28 PM, (4) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), pacmancreator, Nov-17-03, 07:38 PM, (5) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), tryagin, Nov-17-03, 08:02 PM, (6) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), Swissie, Nov-18-03, 04:51 AM, (7) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), wacampbell, Nov-19-03, 01:22 AM, (8) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), dmikulec, Nov-19-03, 07:09 AM, (9) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), henry3, Nov-19-03, 01:24 PM, (10) RE: Driving the Last Spike (56k Warning), Swissie, Nov-20-03, 09:06 AM, (11)
Conferences | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic
-You can never have too much inner beauty. Or socks.
Second: May I pick up a ball or two from your posts above?@ Matt: Basically you are right. I thought a while about which forum to post this to. I decided against the route builders forum or the general one for a specific reason: The project grew and turned out to what it is mostly thanks to some regulars here. So I wanted it to be a privilege of those who care about traction to learn about the MtE first. Eventually, that'll hopefully also bring some more visitors from the larger fora and remind them that the gang here is also doing well...@ Tim Muir: It's nice to see that established members of the traction forum offered so much support and advice once I got rolling. Apart from you, I also need to name Jeff J. Link and Frederick Dreany of the Island Electric who did go quite a way in customizing the MP54s and P-Motors you see above to the Mount E's needs. Needless to say that I appreciate your decision to support two wire heights in your designs about as much. About the wire heightIt's the old question about the chicken and the egg. I really appreciate the traction stock developed by Tim and those other talented authors in the fora here. Also seeing Tim's nice screenshots of the Williamette Valley project - those that keep triggering the "what route?" question by users - was a lot of inspiration and finally wanted me to see whether I could also start creating a home for those units. As it turned out, the Route Editor is manageable. About the RE experienceThe RE can be a mean beast if you have little experience (or worse even no clue of what you're doing), and trying to build a route with anything below 512 MB of RAM is suicide on your nerves. But having Michael Vone's Step by Step Guide to Route Building - this product cannot be praised and advertised enough - and using a top notch desktop with 1024 MB tamed the RE. In 10 weeks, I have encountered five real problems of the RE crashing: 1) In one case of the RE crashing I finally realised that it had been me rotating a forest area too close to the "end of the world" so that one of its corners hung over the outer edge of a tile into the "white void". Whenever the camera pointed directly to that area from anywhere on the affected tile only, the RE would hang itself up and send home.2) In another case, some of the track adapted from Kevin's version of the route formed a very large loop via a branch line of several miles in length and a wye to the main the branch was connected to. Whenever the camera pointed straight down on the tile on which the loop was closed (the one with the wye), be it in the RE when placing and adjusting something, or be it in the Sim when using the "4" view, MSTS called home. Once I had cut that branch line and opened the loop, the problem ceased. My thanks go to Jeff Link for pointing me to the cause here by asking the right question.3) Another issue that triggered send/don't sends was that when I used the F key in the RE to flatten out terrain in a corner where four tiles met, the RE had problems re-adjusting the altitude of the points directly on the "seams" of the terrain: In the hilly terrain, the ground opened up with a "cut" of maybe 50 metres length to 1/2 to 1 metre high (y axis) along one of the seams whenever I tried adjusting the entire area, and ultimately also having the RE call home. As far as I could determine, one should avoid to select an area that covers spots on more than two tiles at the same time when flattening out an entire area around tile boundaries. That means that several steps are needed to iron out the terrain where four tiles meet in a corner. And should the ground open up despite being careful, just point at each of the spots along the tile boundary where the cut has occured, right mouse click it and select the "display altitude" option from the menue. Click ok and MSTS closes the cut at the point in question. Do NOT use the F-key to flatten out an isolated point on a tile boundary, or you get the "vulcano" error of the terrain forming a very high needle/well (I think all the way up/down to the max./min. altitude defined for the tile).4) And finally the RE crashed on me once when I changed (deleted) a piece of dynamic track, and the RE could for some reason or another not update the tsection.dat inside the route folder (the one defining dynamic track sections), leaving me with an empty file. Needless to say the route wouldn't load anymore after that... So I had to restore to the backup I luckily had made just before touching the dynamic track (somehow I felt there was trouble ahead, it seems?) and had to edit the deleted track section out of it manually, including altering the track section counts to the new values, of course. 5) The final problem involved the maximum number of objects a tile supports. This number is 1500. When I did the three tiles that contain the city of Bridgeport, I realised that I was in deep trouble. Why? See this rough count of objects on tile -05697 / 14709, for example- Number of scenery items like buildings, parked cars etc: ca. 150
Gee, there are still a few files left to check & modify, I better get started for today...Lukas a.k.a Swissie