Atomic Systems

jimmyshand wrote: Just Trains are doing Exeter to Bristol and as welcome as that will be, again it's an incredibly dull stretch of line with more straight line running and no major features or landmarks outside of the main stations.

I dont agree with that tbh.

Obviously you have the two main stations but it is far from straight and that line has many features, the approaches to Taunton, Cogload Junction, the loop at Weston Super Mare, the climb to Whiteball Tunnel. Then you have many scenario opportunities with the many loops, Tiverton Junction, a couple of yards and the flask sidings at Bridgwater. It has the potential to be a very interesting route.

Darpor wrote:

jimmyshand wrote: Just Trains are doing Exeter to Bristol and as welcome as that will be, again it's an incredibly dull stretch of line with more straight line running and no major features or landmarks outside of the main stations.

I dont agree with that tbh.

Obviously you have the two main stations but it is far from straight and that line has many features, the approaches to Taunton, Cogload Junction, the loop at Weston Super Mare, the climb to Whiteball Tunnel. Then you have many scenario opportunities with the many loops, Tiverton Junction, a couple of yards and the flask sidings at Bridgwater. It has the potential to be a very interesting route.

But then, I dont totally agree with that, as interesting as it maybe, as that leaves Padd-Oxf - a huge gap, and then Bristol TM-Exeter!!

Darpor wrote:

jimmyshand wrote: Just Trains are doing Exeter to Bristol and as welcome as that will be, again it's an incredibly dull stretch of line with more straight line running and no major features or landmarks outside of the main stations.

I dont agree with that tbh.

Obviously you have the two main stations but it is far from straight and that line has many features, the approaches to Taunton, Cogload Junction, the loop at Weston Super Mare, the climb to Whiteball Tunnel. Then you have many scenario opportunities with the many loops, Tiverton Junction, a couple of yards and the flask sidings at Bridgwater. It has the potential to be a very interesting route.

It will for sure be a welcome addition but I'm sorry to say I do find it an incredibly dull section of line. It's a line I've travelled hundreds of times, I live in Plymouth and whenever I've travelled north by train, as soon as you get past Exeter it becomes incredibly boring and there's virtually nowt to see until you get to Brizzle!! West of Exeter is a treat for both passenger and driver with the miles of seaside running along Dawlish, Teignmouth etc followed by an assault on the legendary Devon Banks.

jimmyshand wrote:I guess my way of looking at it is what route would I prefer to drive if I were doing it for real as a job each day?? (maybe our resident drivers Pacerpilot and co. can give their opinion!!)

Would I want to drive the East Coast Mainline everyday?? Personally I think I'd need 3 flasks of black coffee, 10 packets of cigarettes and 30 litres of Lucozade Sport to keep me awake staring at endless miles of straight trackand flat, featureless terrain!!

or would I like to drive the West Highland Line everyday?? rolling past Loch Lomond, thundering through forest cuttings and meandering up winding hillsides.

No contest for me!!

Well funnily enough.... When I started putting My route together, I was fascinated with the run betwen Carmarthen and Swansea, There are some gruelling gradients initially and once you break out of Llanelli, the scenery is absolutely stunning, as the line litterally hugs the coast, with barely metres between the track and the sea, then it dives inland again through Burryport, Pembrey, Kidwelly before tightly following the estuary all the way into Carmarthen. There are lovely semaphore sections still worked by Lever frame boxes and its world away from those Horrid LED contraptions that burn your retinas....
A month after starting the route, I got transferred to Carmarthen depot...which is a dream come true.

A colleague of mine took a Job with FGW at Swansea and Im not really sure how he copes with it. One type of traction and Up to London and back everyday. Its not my cup of tea (or black coffee ) I sign 6 types of traction now with a route card that varies from zipping up to Cardiff at 100mph, to plodding up the Central Wales line which is simply incredible but a world apart from the former, frequently stopping to exchange NSTR tokens and stopping at open level crossings. Long tunnels and lofty viaducts...its got the lot! Breathtaking isnt the word. Im hoping to extend my route up the HoW but Im not sure how RW will cope with unsignalled passing loops.

London Kings-Cross to York.

I agree fully with all the posts in the thread, route building in a time consuming project, and most times expensive as well. Even though I would love either the WCML or ECML, the great distances between main stations would take a good couple of months to create. If RW had a more effective way of route building, then surely many of us here wouldn't mind doing a section of any route.

Another question is this: should a route builder decide to create any long route, say any of the mainlines, would it be released as freeware or payware? If you spend 1 year and a bit to do maybe a London King Cross to York or something of that sort, maybe even only up to Doncaster or Newcaslte to Leeds.... Surely the developer would require some compensation for all the time and money spent on creating that route????

It's a touchy subject for a lot of us here, I do admit. But the way I see things today, RW is in desperate need of routes, there are only a few good routes out there. Trains are flowing in at an alarming pace, developments in the game core, but the routes trickle in through those devoted developers.

These are just my thoughts on this subject.....

jimmyshand wrote:West Highland Line it simply has to be.

There is no other route like it in the country. So much more interesting, scenic and challenging than say the long, flat straights of York to Newcastle or Oxford to Paddington. Some of the routes being suggested on this thread are a bit boring in my opinion, Railworks needs a real barnstormer of a route to lift it to a new level and there is no other better candidate I can think of than the West Highland Line.

I totally agree 250%, Ft. William to Malliag is easily the best, but Glasgow to Ft. William is a superb route too.

1 example of the challenging gradient, leaving Malliag to return to Ft. William is one huge gradient.
A guard told me one day on that gradient that on one occasion the train did not make it to the top and it had to go back to Malliag to have another go at it, which it did.
There are more stiff gradients than just that one.

Basherz wrote:

Darpor wrote:

jimmyshand wrote: Just Trains are doing Exeter to Bristol and as welcome as that will be, again it's an incredibly dull stretch of line with more straight line running and no major features or landmarks outside of the main stations.

I dont agree with that tbh.

Obviously you have the two main stations but it is far from straight and that line has many features, the approaches to Taunton, Cogload Junction, the loop at Weston Super Mare, the climb to Whiteball Tunnel. Then you have many scenario opportunities with the many loops, Tiverton Junction, a couple of yards and the flask sidings at Bridgwater. It has the potential to be a very interesting route.

But then, I dont totally agree with that, as interesting as it maybe, as that leaves Padd-Oxf - a huge gap, and then Bristol TM-Exeter!!

Well, Im doing Didcot-Swindon as freeware, which hopefully will be finished by the end of the year (if not sooner, if i can prize myself away from KA50 Black Shark), so if you can find some kind soul/mug to do Bristol to Swindon you should be all set. I dont fancy doing it, Bath would be a very labour intensive job to say the least.

Re Bristol Exeter, I welcome it, though Id prefer it as it was in the 30s-50s, just so we can use a wider variety of traction. Still welcome though.

Darpor wrote:I am fully aware of the time it takes although I am starting to develop new methods of building which are speeding up the process for me as well as breaking the tedious nature that route building sometimes brings. If such a plan is to work, possibly start small as a test? If there is a working, driveable route with the correct gradients and surrounding topography, what is to say that any member wont have a go at trying to fill it in. It is certainly something to look at, especially for those who lack the patience to actually lay the track because they find certain elements difficult.

Mulyy's Northern Lights has taken the approach to lay the track etc, with scenary around stations etc and then gradually release later versions as scenery progresses.

An interesting topic of reading, my initial reaction was that if Railworks carries on for the next 10-15 years, ALL of the above routes hopefully would have been created by then, plus quite a few others as well...
What has already been criticised is the boringness of the various route lengths, unfortunately, although I would partially agree, as an ex-railwayman and having travelled to every county in England, Wales and Scotland, today's scene is a total change to what we had 30 - 40 years ago with the closure of so much of Britain's industrial railway heritage. Do we want routes set in today's standards, boring as they may be to some players, or decades ago, which would then require a whole new creation of stations, signal boxes, industries, etc, etc, for each area of the country.
I also think route creators are restricted a little with the textures available, I haven't seen a good rock-face or scree texture yet which would be obviously very necessary if building the West Highland Line for example, or white cliff textures, so, anything from Dover westwards would be equally as difficult, therefore, I think that certain other factors need to be addressed first before our wonderful route-builders attempt to recreate anything. As was also previously mentioned, I think it's a bit of a trade off between realism and the effective running of any layouts on people's computers, it will be interesting to see how Mully's route finishes up from Edinburgh to Glasgow and then north to Aberdeen and Inverness, that's a hell of a lot of square mileage to stretch our power hungry PC's over, and the thing that route creators sometimes forget about us end users is, that I personally have over 50 layouts on my PC from around the world, complete with all assets and over 450 locomotives and rolling stock items, nearly 60 gigs so far, accumulating more content with each download would seriously stretch some peeps resources.

For the record, I'd also like to see the recreation of the West Highland Line, in it's entirety, from Glasgow to Oban, Fort William, Mallaig and the Kyle of Lochalsh, complete with flower borders and hanging baskets on all the station platforms...

Cheerz. Transport Steve.

Hi all,
This is just a thought:
In a prototypical route, would it be acceptable to compress any part of the route? I'm thinking in terms of squeezing long sections of plain track and monotonous scenery into a short section between stations. Or is that a non-starter?
regards Ted.

I'd say such compression would automatically not make the route prototypical anymore, so I guess the question answers itself...
(for example such compression would no longer make it possible to recreate real-world timetables)

Oldpufferspotter wrote:Hi all,
This is just a thought:
In a prototypical route, would it be acceptable to compress any part of the route? I'm thinking in terms of squeezing long sections of plain track and monotonous scenery into a short section between stations. Or is that a non-starter?
regards Ted.

The current "real world" use of Lat/Lon and DEM data in RW unfortunately makes that very difficult if not impossible.

As regards freeware vs payware, my idea of the minimalistic route but that gives you 150 or 200 miles of driveable track would of necessity have to be free, I think.

Re flat routes, well actually that sums up quite a bit of the UK. I escaped for the morning today for a regional visit down the Cotswold and Malvern line then back to Swindon via Newport. We very much live in identikit Britain with the same palisade fencing, pre-fabricated industrial and retail units in just about every village/town and city. Oh and everything plastered in grafitti, even spread to the most unlikely of places such as Kingham!

I would very much like to see the Tyne Valley line (Newcastle-Carlisle), in the 50s-70s era.

ckmemphis wrote:Another question is this: should a route builder decide to create any long route, say any of the mainlines, would it be released as freeware or payware? If you spend 1 year and a bit to do maybe a London King Cross to York or something of that sort, maybe even only up to Doncaster or Newcaslte to Leeds.... Surely the developer would require some compensation for all the time and money spent on creating that route????

Heh, '1 year'... Trainz 2010 has a fairly complete (but still needs bug fixing) KX to York route, complete with spurs off to Hull and other areas. It's taken a team of several (part of the DPS' work) 5 years and counting. And trainz' route building is far easier than RW's

The idea that any individual could produce KX to York in 'a year and a bit' in RW, to modern standards, is simply laughable, to be honest.

IF it were to be done, it would almost certainly have to be payware, unless you can find a sponsor that wants it for their own use (like how the DPS has done - trainz 2010 forms the basis of their cab simulator at the NRM & on tour). I'm not sure it could be done for a price that the community would consider acceptable either.

That said, I voted for KX to York for the simple reason that large prototypical routes are needed. The ECML may be huge and 'boring' to some, but it offers many areas where smaller scale operations can be done. Of course, this is an advantage trainz has, as it has better support for industry and operations than RW does at present. Hatfield (the yorkshire one) to Drax, shunting stock around FP/Holloway, Belle Isle, etc etc. And the main line is still there for 'longer session' scenarios if you want it.

(Any KX To York route would want to follow the DPS' lead and model the 1970s/early 80s ECML, before York was simplified, and before the goods yards and carriage sidings were ripped up all along the ECML - although being forced through pre-1983 Selby can be annoying)