I think across the three tiles there are a few hundred track shapes.maybe 600-800 or so. Real example: Doing the yard for Port Costa on the Cal-P.
I each case you have to do an extensive trial and error of curvature and the closing of the final gap back into the main. Any diverging but generally parallel path that has to come back to the main but the curves of that path are not symetrical. You have to redo the throat.Īs bad as figuring out curves on grades: Any wye that's not equal on all sides. you lay the yard throat, the tracks, the throat at the far end. So you gotta pull it all out and do it over the right way.Īlmost as bad. You learn the hard way to always lay the tracks all in one direction.
Why? Difference of decimal precision plus rounding somewhere and it added up to a noticible problem.
there's a bad track joint with the last shape you drop in. Teammate build you a bridge or building with an orientation that's at an odd angle to the lie of the track? Gotta use the object rotator spreadsheet and hand edit the world file.ĭiscover that going down to the far end of the yard, building the throat (with it's curves), and coming back the other way filling in the rest of the tracks gets you. And pull out might include pull out the 20 + track sections you were sure a half hour ago were going to be fine". So "you pull out each failure, and try again. Really long tangent? You know where it's supposed to lie but if you can't get that lead-in curve perfect - and I mean perfect - the far end of that long tangent is going to plop down anywhere but where it is supposed to go. And pull out might include pull out the 20 + track sections you were sure a half hour ago were going to be fine. The answer is you try all sorts of things, pull out each failure, and try again. 250 ascent that 200m later you'll either be making a big cut where you don't want one or will be using a grade of 1.250?
how do you know beforehand you're going to need 7 degrees of 280r curves as the tightest radius? How do you know beforehand you can use 3 different radii as the transition into that curve, with individual radius of 1500r01d, 700r05d, and 500r05d? How do you know beforehand that if you continue to use a grade of. I would imagine that would at least double a route's build time. (Shameless plug - Wenatchee & Cashmere RR available at When creating a commercial route, every object must be created by the company producing the route. That seems simple enough, but I'd estimate that it took me 6-9 months to do a 10 mile short line (26 total miles of track including sidings and industry spurs), and I didn't create any custom objects except the terrain textures. beta testing (you've got to make sure the package works interactive placement (signals, crossing gates, car spawners)ġ0. object creation (I've never done this, but I would imagine it takes a long time to get it right)Ħ. laying track (the more precise, the longer it takes)ĥ. setting up route markers (either using marker files or satellite images)ģ.
terrain creation (extraction, downloading DEMs, implementing DEMs)Ģ. A simplified version of the steps involved in creating a route would go something like this:ġ. There is nothing simple or quick about building a route.