Revisiting Didcot

Having spent much of Saturday at Didcot Railway Centre's Victorian-themed weekend (entertaining and enjoyable - a pity the patronage appeared to be on the low side), I've taken the opportunity to make a few changes at the Didcot end of the layout. I'll be adding a few more small railway objects to what's already in place, and I've also started work on adding the 'backscene' to the railway triangle: with so much going on in the middle of the three sides of the triangle, it's easy to overlook what's beyond the railway. So my 'recce' on Saturday included taking in detail of the townscape. The foot- and roadbridge at the north junction are now pretty much in place: below is a shot of 66201 passing under the A4130 bridge en route to the Appleford stone terminal.


I've been toying with the idea of giving the main line a break for a few weeks while I concentrate on either the Bicester or the Cowley branch. The track is laid to Bicester and given that - once past Kidlington - the line runs through little more than countryside, this should be simple enough to complete. The Cowley branch will be more of a challenge, running as it does through the outer suburbs of Oxford, with some landmark scenery items along the way (Thames bridge, Sainsbury's and Tesco's supermarkets, Blackbird Leys towers, the Greyhound stadium and, of course, the BMW factory). On the other hand, the line is within spitting distance of my place of work, making site visits and photography extremely practical.

Confessions of a route-builder

Building this route has been largely enjoyable so far; it's also been relatively straightforward because of the following resources which I've relied on very heavily:

• Google SketchUp (GSU) - an absolute breeze to use
• Google Earth - particularly useful because of its integration with GSU, enabling me to get near-to-accurate dimensions for plans of structures and the like. Shortly after I started the route, and after I'd laid most of the track, Google decided to release high-resolution coverage for Oxfordshire. This has proved invaluable ever since - a bit of shame it appeared after I'd made a start.
• Personal knowledge of the route. This is indispensable: I wouldn't have made a route if I was unfamiliar with it in any way. I guess most MSTS route-builders start with the fact that they know the route they plan to build. It also adds to the fun once the route is completed - at some point I'll be able to race past my house in Kidlington in whatever rolling stock I want. Now that beats reality.
• Location visits with a digital camera (currently a Canon S2IS which I'm very pleased with). Images can be used for creating textures and improved representations of scenery objects, as well as for recording detail and the position of structures, etc.
  
• The 'Branch Line Videos' cabride DVD of the Reading-Coventry section, purchased from that 'Mecca' of railway video/dvd merchandise known as Wolverton Rail. I discovered this shortly after starting on the route. It's a few years out-of-date now but the signalling has barely changed and the main lineside features are still around.

Perhaps this list will be useful for any budding route builders out there.

Here's Culham yet again - for comparison, the cabride DVD on the left and the MSTS version on the right.

Head-to-head with Kuju!

Today's announcement by Kuju that their forthcoming Rail Simulator is due for release on 5th October has added a bit of impetus to my efforts. One of the routes included in the simulator package is Paddington to Oxford, which of course overlaps with my MSTS route. So is this the beginning of the end for my route?
Not at all. On 5th October I'm due to be in central Edinburgh and a visit to 'Game' in Princes Street to purchase said product is a temptation I'll find very hard to resist. I'm looking forward to seeing what Kuju have done - not just how their new sim compares with MSTS - but how they've modelled the Oxford route features, how true-to-life it is, how well it captures the atmosphere. It may give me some ideas.
There will be a huge amount of activity related to KRS over the next few months, particularly as modellers get to grips with building KRS-compatible objects, but in the meantime I'll be plodding on with MSTS and see if I can complete my project before KRS2 comes out. (Well, there's bound to be one...isn't there?)

Meanwhile, here's Didcot Railway Centre's very own no. 5051 Earl Bathurst on the demonstration line.

Navvies versus MSTS

To all MSTS route builders: Whenever you're tempted to think that building your route is tedious, painfully slow and fraught with frustration, spare a thought for the navvies who built the original. For me, a brief recollection of the toil and labour they underwent for the great gains they made certainly puts my meagre efforts into some sort of perspective. And I suspect their work has lasted substantially longer than mine ever will.
Culham station is gradually taking shape: still much detail to be applied, but the essence is there now. 66532 was spotted there today racing south towards Didcot.

Culham takes shape

Culham station is slowly coming together (seen left in SketchUp). After my 'recce' I've pieced together the platforms and am working on the (now disused) station building. This is a typical GW red-brick with dressed stone structure and could be useful elsewhere on the route - at the now closed Aynho, for example.

The other distinctive feature at Culham is the public house ('Railway Arms') which abuts onto the road bridge at the south end of the station. So that's the next project - and then it's the usual station clutter: approach roads and bridge,fencing, lampposts, and other more generic structures away from the immediate vicinity of the station.

MSTS Oxford route

After months of inactivity, I've decided I could use my blog for something useful - to give the MSTS (that's Microsoft Train Simulator in case you're wondering) community a handy insight into what's going on with my Oxford route.
Here are some basic data:

• Coverage: Banbury to Didcot Parkway, Oxford North Junction to Bicester Town and the first mile or so of the old OW&W line from Wolvercote Junction. This is my local patch and playing with the route means I don't have to walk down the road to the level crossing to watch trains. The GW Society centre at Didcot is included, and about a mile or so beyond Banbury and Didcot in all directions. (edit: The first route I attempted to create was Guildford to Portsmouth, familiar to me from days of childhood; this is now due to be overtaken and surpassed by Dave Corfield's excellent Dorset Coast route.)
  
• Contemporary setting: when I do get out of my armchair I can take photos to model the route accurately. I'm not a fan of the post-privatisation scene but it's current and popular with many. The route works reasonably well with stock from the sectorisation era of the late 1980s, which is when I first travelled on the (real) route.
  
• Custom models: there is a huge amount of freeware stock available for nutters like me, and I'm hugely indebted to all those content creation wizards at UKTS. To create a strong sense of realism and immersing oneself in the route, however, I've taken the decision to build my own models for as many of the lineside structures as possible. It's time-consuming but I feel it will be worth it. Since I'm a bit of a cheapskate I'm actually just using Google SketchUp - I know it has its limitations and isn't taken seriously by most of the game-playing modelling community, but I love it for its simplicity. Thanks to a fantastically useful plugin by Paul Gausden (aka Decapod) I can export my models from SketchUp straight to MSTS. I'm pleased with the results, by and large.

What I plan to do is use this blog to provide updates on progress, post screenshots, etc. Here's one for starters - a northbound Voyager racing through Radley (camera shutter late by a second):