Landscape painting

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.