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Colleagues,Having a bit of firewall trouble, but if I get it corrected, I will include a image with this. The NP guys have been hard at work this afternoon, with the help of Ron Picardi, on the "S" Curve trestle at Dorsey, ID.This "THING" is on 14 degree curves with 180' of tangent in between. The curves and dimensions are a guess, based on topo maps, and several images of it. This is the biggest trestle on the line, but there are others. This one was destroyed twice in forest fires, notably in 1910, and part of it was destroyed in an Avalanche at another time - the latter involving a passenger train.J. H. Sullivan
Just to mention, this structure was getting poly heavy. So, I worked out a way and a custom texture,so it was possible to use cross bracings on a tiled texture and eliminate a ton of polys on this structure.SRV Ron
With reference to Ron's comment. I meant to say more, but had so much trouble getting the firewall settings right, that I forgot. His custom texture, tiled as required, allows all of the interior cross bracing to be done with 4 polys per bent, whereas any other way would take several hundred. Likewise it is possible, on the straight portion, to tile both ways and do the entire straight portion's sides with 2 pieces, total 4 polys. I have completed the trestle except for some tweaking of the east end curve (the one shown) and it stands at about 3600 polys, so by the time I do the timber abutment, I will need to do the west curve (at bottom, mostly out of image) seperately. All of the other trestles should be "one piece", and I believe all of them are on curves averaging 12-14 degrees. At this point, the grade is relatively modest, about 2%, but on the upper level, it reaches 3.6%. Anybody want to do a relatively modern compound 2-8-8-2, NP used them on this branch, but even those were rated a mere 700 tons.
Thanks to Ron, we are able to do the impossible sometimes. It involves a little "dark magic" perhaps. As we know, the trestle does not perform a structural function, so we can fake it anyway we need to that looks good. Use of the low poly, X-braches looks just as good, but is far easier on video disadvantaged systems like mine.J. H. Sullivan
