Hi everyone,
It's about time for an update from digital North Wales, especially as the rolling stock stable is expanding - with many thanks to Steve for the hard work going on in that direction, lovely to see an obs car for the route!
The railway itself is now complete as far north as Waunfawr station, and a lot of the basic distant scenery has been put in place beyond for the last few miles to Caernarfon. This has been quite routine simple stuff with nothing particular to show for it (hence the lack of recent updates) and as the area has no clear cut-off for the distant view I've had to lay down a lot of far-off walls and suchlike - one of my pet hates is zooming out from a train only to see the Great Green Billiard Table of the Beyond stretching off into the distance. I've probably already modelled far more than anyone will ever look at! But it does make the world look more real so I think it is a worthwhile effort.
Geographically there are only about three miles between Waunfawr and Caernarfon but rather than linking the two towns via the shortest route the railway actually follows two sides of a triangle to get there via Dinas. This comes about from the historic origins of the WHR which was cobbled together from several other preceding route projects in the area, and in fact it was partly due to this indirect route (and also the inconvenient need to change onto the standard gauge at Dinas Junction) which meant that the original Welsh Highland Railway was never really a commercial success in the 1930's. From a modellers point of view it just means a whole load of extra world that I need to replicate!
Now that the distant world has taken some sort of shape, I can see where the railway needs to fit in and it should be quite straightforward to move on with tracklaying. Once that is done and graded there are only a few really big challenges left from an asset placement perspective, the biggest of which will be to somehow get Caernarfon and the castle to look right. The rest will be a simple but time-consuming matter of filling in the fields and suchlike, putting speed signs and whistle boards in, sound domes, night lighting, detailing nearby settlements, and putting about seven thousand sheep into various fields. Not much, right?!
Then once all that is done I'll have to face up to the software bits and pieces to swap the ground texture sets etc etc and figure out why I can't get any other season than summer to show... but that is currently waiting until the scenic stuff is more or less complete.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of random shots taken at Waunfawr...
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =848640898
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... =848641150
Thanks again for reading, more updates on progress as and when!
ThePhantomPhish
~ Digital model railway engineer responsible for the North Wales Narrow Gauge Railways route ~
