Way back in the 1890s in the land of the long white cloud there was a need to get from here to there and back again. Trouble was, there was way up hill from here. A way was eventually discovered by Holmes but it was by way of a few horse shoes and a few curves and a circle with a tunnel or two and all the while going up up up. Sadly the task fell to two teams of five to attempt the task of creating some sort of resemblance of reality in Railworks from the vision of Holmes.
While this route is based on an engineering triumph on the New Zealand North Island Main Trunk railway, between Raurimu and National Park, it is not intended to be a facsimile of the real thing. Some bending of the track is required to comply with the rules and I suspect it will raise far more questions than answers but that’s neither here nor there. Life skills are called for here
.In the real world........
The railway forms an ascending spiral southwards, with two tunnels, a circle and three hairpin bends. From the north, trains pass Raurimu before going round a 180° bend to the left in a horseshoe curve, climbing above the track on which they have just travelled. Two sharp bends to the right follow, after which the line passes through two short tunnels. Trains then complete a full circle, crossing over the longer of the two tunnels through which they have just passed, before continuing towards Wellington. Two kilometres further on the line has two further sharp bends, to the right and then to the left. After the second of these bends a train has risen 132 m and travelled 6.8 km from Raurimu - the straight-line distance is 2 km. The engineer was R W Holmes - the year 1898. (from Wikipedia)
Ross
NZ
.
