Right, just an update for everyone on what’s happening with the Bala Hub. The routes finished and I am writing the activities. Got most of the BR diesel stuff done without any problems. Much the same for the GWR steam activities too but I am having major problems trying to do some BR(M) and LMS steam activities. Some of the locos won’t pull the skin of the proverbial pudding (not much use on the Bala Hub with a climb from sea level to over 1300 feet in a few miles). Lots of the BR(M) and LMS stock has major problems with coupling/brake and bounding box errors. As I like my activities to start and end on shed the need to couple and uncouple easily is a necessity. I'm not having much success trying to contact the stock authors either. At the moment I'm writing an BR(M) steam passenger activity which requires the stock to be shunted out of the carriage sidings into the station, the loco then runs around to couple to the front. Later in the activity the train reverses direction at Bala junction with the loco having to run around the stock. At the end the loco is uncoupled and run to shed. At the moment this activity is a hit and miss nightmare so I swapped the BR(M) stock for Robin Howels GWR clerestories and it now runs reasonably well (but not very prototypical
). Hopefully the route will be available soon.What with the scarcity of decent freeware UK stock (has the UK MSTS scene died in the last two months, not much in the way of new stock uploaded apart from modern stuff) the lack of support from members of the community with requests for assistance in modelling and activity writing, the effort involved in producing a freeware route of this magnitude on ones own is just to much.
The upshot of all this is once the Bala Hub is out that’s the end of my freeware route building until MSTS2 appears. If other commitments allow I shall be trying to fill in some of the steam loco gaps now that I am back to animating full Walschaerts valve motions after a few years away from it.
Gordon
Turn your back for a couple of months and the Forums have turned into a battlefield.
