Modelling the Cherwell Valley

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.