Atomic Systems

Hi All.
Probarly having a bit of a stupid moment, but, has anyone ever considered trying to create some sort of software that would allow you to join routes together, for example London South East London South Coast and Dorset Coast, or Thames Mersey with North West England, just a thought but imagine the sort of runs you could have with almost the entire southern region in one massive route.
Stuart

Hi Stuart

Its not a daft question... and the software exists.
TK Tools part of Route Riter.
However before you get excited its difficult, and no UK routes meet the criteria.
Two NA routes were joined a while back.

Cheers
Jon

what do you mean when you say criteria?

Cheers Matt

cilperiswh wrote:what do you mean when you say criteria?

Cheers Matt

To start with the routes need to share physical tiles in MSTS, and they need to be at the same elevation.

jbilton wrote:Hi Stuart

Its not a daft question... and the software exists.
TK Tools part of Route Riter.
However before you get excited its difficult, and no UK routes meet the criteria.
Two NA routes were joined a while back.

Cheers
Jon

Pardon me for my oldish brain cells but which NA routes and was it released

salopiangrowler wrote:

jbilton wrote:Hi Stuart

Its not a daft question... and the software exists.
TK Tools part of Route Riter.
However before you get excited its difficult, and no UK routes meet the criteria.
Two NA routes were joined a while back.

Cheers
Jon

Pardon me for my oldish brain cells but which NA routes and was it released

Hi
I think it was called 'The Golden Spike' .... and it was a couple of years back.
Unfortunately I don't do much NA.

Cheers
Jon

salopiangrowler wrote:
Pardon me for my oldish brain cells but which NA routes and was it released

Otto used the options in Route_Riter/TsUtils to merge the Marias Pass and Whitefish addons and I believe another route into a single entity.

There was also a Chinese route which covered about 1800 km which was made by merging routes and I believe there was also one of the U.S. North East Corridor routes which was built by merging routes.

While it is possible, it depends upon things like both routes using the same signals config files, tracks (you can't mix xtracks/ukfinescale etc at the join).

Taking everything into account, it is not very easy for any but the most simple routes.

Mike

jbilton wrote:TK Tools part of Route Riter.
However before you get excited its difficult, and no UK routes meet the criteria.
Two NA routes were joined a while back.

Hi Jon,

Actually quite a number of merged routes have now been produced. Go here for advice on how to do it.
http://hawkdawg.com/MSTS/tuts/chuck/merge.htm

Scroll down to section 3 to see Chuck's projects.

There is no single criterion that would stop you from merging any pair (or more) of UK routes. With the tools available, you can shift a route N-S or E-W and adjust altitude to suit. Here's a screenie of my current project, two routes joined at the common town of Durango, Colorado.
http://forums.flightsim.com/vbts/showth ... 5#poststop

The route on the west side (Rio Grande Southern) had to be dropped 1000 meters to match elevation. Enter a number, push a button...

This just requires a bit of careful, painstaking planning, but anything is possible. Mike mentioned signaling systems, but those can be manually combined after the route merge. If you want to continue editing after the merge, you will have to manually combine REF files, carspawn.dat and forest.dat. Those are easily done.

regards,
charlie

trouble with merging the likes of Whitefish and Marias pass means its a 12 hour route end to end without the stopping

Hi
Yes .... I'm still not sure there are any two UK routes that meet the requirements.
Although I forgot , EB did commercially combine there south coast routes.
Cheers
Jon

I was wondering about the EB routes - surely all those that come in parts, but also run fine standalone without the other parts qualify?

gswindale wrote:I was wondering about the EB routes - surely all those that come in parts, but also run fine standalone without the other parts qualify?

I was talking about the LBE and WCE later becoming the South Coast

Hi Axell,

I have just read this page and the answer to your question is simply complicated. To join to routes, you need to have done your homework on the routes in question, and need to be prepared to experiment to get things to work. I have knitted routes together before and I would say it was worth doing it at the time because I was still discovering MSTS, but to share the results would involve asking permission from the original authors to do so, and this may well prove to be an obstacle. I found that the route merges were not too difficult to do if you were prepared to merge the signalling systems, work out the interfaces and put up with the TDB errors which MSTS is inclined to throw out from time to time. I have done a partial merge of TM and NWE, but the Manchester tiles have to be rebuilt and links designed to the rest ot the connectons in NWE. I added in the Lakes, which is still fairly incomplete, but I can run a train from Euston to Carlisle. Mission acomplished! However, I have found that diveting my creativity into scenery and train modelling to be more satisfying in the long run, as I am able to share these.

HI
It sounds far to complicated which is a shame considering the scope that joining several routes together, just imagine if someone ever created the North London Line and you could join Great Eastern to Thames Mersey (Via NLL) then to North West England and then to Carlise to Glasgow, along with the option of joining the East Coast Express and Mkidland Mainline.

Just a side question having got Midland Mainline is it worth getting the Farringdon Extension, and also does Farringdon Ext join upto LSC?

Cheers Stuart

Just out of interest I tried to copy and paste the TDB for Dorset Coast (17.5 Mb) onto the end of the TDB for Thames-Mersey (22.5 Mb) in Wordpad, and I discovered that there is a finite length to a Wordpad file, and it would only paste in about 1/2 the DC TDB. Now I am not sure if that is a limitation in Wordpad or if it is a limitation on the file size.

If it is the latter then it would clearly limit the possibility of which routes could in theory be combined, if it is the former then very large routes could be combined, but without the ability to manually edit the TDB, it could be of limited use.

Dave