'Overjoyed' is not putting it too strongly. Anton Courtney is in the process of repainting Dave Babb's model of a Class 166 into FGW colours. With this, the modern-day image for my route is complete: until now FGW HSTs and Virgin Voyagers have been speeding past forlorn passengers at intermediate stations who are wondering whether their next local service is ever going to turn up. But Anton kindly gave me a sneak preview of his model and, as of today, the passengers (yes, I did say 'passengers') on my route can now have stopping and semi-fast services to and from Oxford. Having said that, we could still do with a Voyager in Cross Country livery. This is the difficulty with modelling the real world: it changes.
That's modern-day image. Step back 20 years and, with the kind assistance of Jon Bilton (there are an awful lot of decent people in the UKTS community), I've been able to do a repaint of a Class 119 in blue-grey livery, just how I remember the units as they trundled up and down the North Downs line past our house in Guildford. Apparently it's one of the top eight most downloaded files from UKTS over the past 15 days - people out there seem to be enjoying it. Jon has done a great job of plugging in some gaps in the first-generation DMU stable; I may have a go at helping fill some of the others. It's almost a cliche on the UKTS forum these days that MSTS1 still has a lot of life in it: speaking for myself, I feel as though I've only just got the hang of it.
It's been a long, long time... Never fear, the route is still under construction. The painful task of 'filling in the gaps' is taking its toll. Adding tree after tree, bush after bush - the gantry method of laying trackside scenery is fine to a point, but I'd like to find the balance between realism and practicality.
What I have been noticing, travelling as I do not infrequently between Oxford and London or the north, is that while I have been beavering away at constructing models of real-life buildings, new buildings have popped up to add to my workload or - worse still - old ones have disappeared! Thus a new building is under construction adjacent to the loco refuelling point at Didcot (next to the west curve), and the temporary station footbridge at Radley has now been removed in favour of a more permanent structure (not before time, admittedly).
Even more incentive, then, for me to crack on with the route - otherwise in several years' time it will become unrecognisable! I jest, of course, but it is a reminder to me to distinguish between the ephemeral and the lasting: and I guess it means that whenever I do eventually complete the route people may be forgiving if one or two details aren't quite right.
In the meantime, here's Anton Courtney-May's superb reskin of an IC125 in Swallow livery departing Didcot for the West - just to prove that some things don't change but merely look different.
One of the challenges of the route is modelling the River Cherwell and Oxford Canal. The railway was originally built to compete with the Oxford Canal and as such the paths of the two follow each very closely north of Oxford. The trouble is that modelling waterways in MSTS is not entirely satisfactory, unless you wish to create a sea or lake. The resolution of the tile vertices is just not high enough to provide a finely contoured edge.
The best alternative is to create canal or river models and so that's what I've done. Ideally I'd like to get them into the standardised tsection.dat file and then to be able to join them 'magnetically', along the lines of the road sections (see http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic.php?f=240&t=34446 for discussion on this). That's a while off, however, so in the meantime I've placed the sections manually... and this is the tedious part. It can take hours to place a number of sections together to obtain a satisfactory result. They look fine from a distance, as shown in this shot of a Turbo in NSE livery at Enslow: the canal is to the left, the Cherwell (looking unusually navigable) to the right.
Just a few hundred yards towards Oxford, here's the same Turbo approaching the A4095 close to the delightfully-named Gibraltar. In the background is the towering chimney of the Bletchingdon cement works.
Finally, a view from Roundham level crossing. This is an MSL crossing in real life ('Miniature Stop Light') but my modelling skills are not quite adequate to enable me to make a flashing red light, let alone have a continuous green and a flashing red light. I need to tweak the texture on this model to show a red light, of course, as the only time anyone will be able to see a view such as this in the sim is on the approach of a train.
Something which makes the best MSTS routes stand out is an enhanced level of detail. Examples which stand out are the group of 'the railway children' waving at the level crossing in the Steyning route; platform markers in Dorset Coast; AWS ramps in Great Eastern; and the plethora of flora in the GWR/Toddington route. Though I'm less familiar with non-UK routes, some of those I've looked at are outstanding in this respect.
Details like this - and I've picked only a tiny selection - set a benchmark for other routes in terms of quality, and of course they also enhance the player experience. Subconsciously I've been striving to attain a similar level in at least two ways: (i) by creating custom objects based on the prototypes which per se look more realistic, and (ii) by adding extra objects which are not essential to the driving experience. An example of each can be found in the Oxford stabling sidings: (i) a custom set of floodlights based on the originals, rather than freeware stock items I've downloaded; and (ii) a set of bins used for cleaning out the Turbos stabled there (I'm not sure what their official name is - drop me a line if you know!). Using Mosaic to create custom textures to blend the ballast with the surrounding grass terrain is in my opinion critical to improving the look.
So in this post I've provided a couple of shots of the yard. At the top is 66504 powering south with a Freightliner service, with a handful of First Group rolling stock stabled in the sidings. And just below is a ground-level shot taken a couple of seconds later, with the shunters' cabin in the left foreground.
By contrast, Oxford station itself (below) - although almost complete structurally, is lacking in the sort of detail which will make it come alive. There's a solitary passenger on the footbridge but no nameplates and minimal station clutter. I sense that adding this could be a never-ending project, so the trick will be to work out when to stop...
Good news with which to kick off 2008: the route is continuing, despite silence on the blog for nearly two months. Responsibilities of life (that's family and work) have prevented me from reporting very much, but now and again I've had an opportunity to add a little bit here and there to the route.
Notable among the projects completed or on which progress has been made:
the rebuilding of Appleford station following a site visit on a wet and windy Saturday morning.
the rebuilding of Oxford station from platform level up. I've used Google Earth to scale the buildings correctly, and have also improved textures and added features to bring the model into line with more recently-built stations, to give a level of consistency.
realignment of trackwork at Oxford station to enable signals to be placed correctly.
addition of an assortment of other custom objects. Well over 150 custom objects have been created so far, from entire stations to bridges and speed restriction signs.
Just to prove that the route is very much alive and kicking, I've been playing around with Fraps tonight to create a 'movie' showing off parts of the route. It seems to be fashionable at the moment to create videos of your sim activities - I've seen some very impressive ones and, if done well, they are useful for providing demos of routes and rolling stock. I'm not sure that this video is particularly impressive but it's not designed as a work of art - more a means of demonstrating a few parts of the route and showing how it mirrors the real-life route. Click on the link immediately below to see the finished piece. Feedback welcome, of course - but do bear in mind that the route is still very much work in progress.
I see it's been over a month since I last posted. No excuses for this, apart from the fact that work has been extremely busy and family life likewise. Spare time for route-building has been expended on actually doing the building and not adding to this blog - I feel I've got my priorities right in those two cases at least.
I'm coming to the end of a week's annual leave, during which I've had the opportunity to play around with Digital Rails' Mosaic, a tool designed to enable route-builders to (among other things) texture terrain far more efficiently than is possible in the MSTS Route Editor. Having recently hit upon an excellent set of freeware terrain textures (also including a good variety of vegetation models), and hearing all the accolades poured by route builders on Mosaic, I decided it was worth the £15/$30 investment for the full licence and have been landscape painting ever since. I'm no expert at manipulating digital images and, needing to follow the Mosaic tutorials, I found it necessary to get the trial version of PaintShopPro. The full version of the latter costs £79 which is rather too expensive for my budget - money better spent elsewhere in my opinion - so that means I'll have to do all my terrtex tweaking in the next month, before the demo licence expires. Now if that's not pressure...
This shot of a Chiltern Railways' 168 at Kings Sutton demonstrates how even moderate terrain texturing can make a difference to the route.
The blog has been quiet lately for no other reason than that I've been travelling around. After the jaunt to Ireland (a country depressingly thin on the railway interest front - though I'm sure there are many who will disagree), work took me to Malta (a step beyond Ireland on the railway front - admittedly the plentiful Bedford and Leyland buses dating from the '60s to the '80s make up for this in a big way) and then Edinburgh. The highlight of the latter was the unmistakeable sound of a Deltic engine coming to my ears while I was strolling through Princes Street Gardens: sure enough, there was 55022 'Royal Scots Grey' at Waverley with (I discovered afterwards) the ECS for a railtour today from Dundee to Oban (see photo).
All this means, of course, that progress with the route has been slow. Today I've created a WIA wagon consist for use as static scenery: there are shots on the UKTS Forum thread here. A rebuild of Banbury station is slowly unfolding. And sometime soon I'll be working on the Bicester branch.
