After surviving a fairly sharp learning curve at high speed, I've finally got all the kinks worked out of DEMed landscape, got a darned near lifesize arial map of my area of interest loaded into PhotoMap with markers placed and converted with Waypoints. But (there's always a but)even with Lat/Long tweaked via Waypoint to get the markers close to home, there's still a problem. It's as if either the entire marker file, or the landscape it's plotted on in RE needs to rotated slightly. I'm attaching a picture that might be worth 1000 words towards explaining what I'm talking about. Using the Lat/Long adjust in Waypoints, I was able to line up an arbitrary starting point along the marker trail prefectly. A nice obvious little valley that the tracks gently curve through. The markers are dead on. Proceeding westward approximately 4 miles, there is another landmark. The tracks cross a creek with a slight 'ramp' of earth on either side where a rail bridge sits. As the picture shows, at this point the markers have drifted a bit. The marker pole in the foreground is the west end of the bridge, the next marker further back the east end. I drew the red line to approximate the path that would be totally correct.
I've checked and double checked the placement of markers in PhotoMap and tried further tweaking in Waypoint with only east/west north/south adjustments happening. I suspect the problem is probably differences in the way RE displays the landscape versus real world versus arial maps. The question I guess is, is this as good as it gets? Having the markers in the neighborhood but not exact, and using them only as a rough guide with one eye squinted and my tongue hanging out as the main means of track placement?
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(Tanglefoot Curve)
Clearly I didn't follow the markers exactly, but tried to match the grade to the terrain that the DEM provided. This may have been due to the fact that I had 30m DEMs in this area, and so the terrain generated wasn't exactly the same as reality. But that would assume that the markers were placed exactly and the coordinates in USAPhotoMaps, the DEMs, and the RE are all accurate, and all aligned precisely the same relative to each other. They're not 100% accurate, and there are some differences in their reference points, so you'll end up with some of these differences.I think the best you can do is to try and match some key landmarks, especially near the starting point, and make adjustments as you go along. The bottom line is that you can't see the markers in the game, and we're not going to be carrying a GPS as we drive the MSTS trains along the route, so the goal should be to make the end result look as much as possible like the prototype.I've started doing a "pre-survey" to lay out where the track should go. I do this by starting at the end of the track and using a 250m straight road section elevated to the grade I think I need. I then swing the track and find the intersection with the terrain and place a tree there. I move along, trying to match the markers as closely as possible, but maintaining grade. I do this for about a mile, and see whether I am getting myself too far from the markers or too far from a known landmark (such as a tunnel entrance). If I'm too far away, I'll adjust the grade so that I get to where I need to be. If I'm pretty much on target, I'll lay that portion of track (about 1-2 miles worth), and then repeat the process. This has worked well for the mountainous terrain I'm in, but can be applied to pretty much any route.The goal should be to put the track where it makes the route look like the prototype, not where it matches a database.AndyAndy