Easing on down the tracks in the last few days I've reached the town of Darling. Yep, Darling. Darling probably brings me to 60 to 65% completion for what I call the rough draft of the route. I'm including a couple of pics of the town which I hope to be completed tomorrow or the next day. From Darling I hope to be blitzing on down the tracks to 80% completion by the New Year's Day.

Here's the progress map:

Here's the first pic. See the retaining wall? New objects are still being added so there's always a fresh look to the route.

And here's the second picture. This is just one small aspect of this small town. On the other side of the railroad tracks which you cannot see, there's more to the town. I'm trying some new stuff on that part of town which I hope to have a picture of soon. The town itself probably stretches for a tile. It's still a small town, just sprawling a bit.

Rich Garber

Some more pics from Darling.

This first pic is a shot of a Canton Geep from the road.

This next pic is from the front side, pretty close to the same area as the above shot was taken.

Darling is in the form a T. In the previous city pic you saw the crossing bar of the T. This next pic would be the stem of the T.

Rich G

Wow! Rich as usual your work is unique, one of a kind and truly Garberish. Looking forward with eager anticipation for this extension of an already supberb work.

Craig Keopke (kep)

I had some time to take a gander at Rich Cowen's Family Lines Central rollingstock for Canton and took a couple pics I thought were good enough to frame. This is some really nice work done by Rich and Marv Keur is checking them out as I write. The weathering is superb and the black is perfect. It's not overly saturated and it's not a gray. The freight rollingstock is just as good and folks, if you haven't had a Tetanus shot lately, you might want to consider it. These are some very rusty rustic looking freight cars. All the rollingstock blended in well with the scenery too. By this I mean the lighting levels match the scenery. Here's a couple of framed shots taken from the same area pictured above.

Rich G

The unit pictured in both pictures is a GP15. I saw a SD40 and a MP15 as well. Sorry, no pictures of them yet. The picture above is taken just before the town of Darling. The picture here is of Darling at the stone wall and meant more to show off the rollingstock. I'd like to add that the compressing of the pictures is making the black look a little lighter than in the sim. When you're in the sim, there's no question the units are a weathered black.

Rich G

Attention to detail yields unbelievable results!

Health and Safety

There is no danger of tetanus from any of my models though there is a very slight risk of mad cowen's disease after continual exposure to the models over a 24 hour period.


If you spend a solid 24 hours on the sim your sanity could be questioned any way

The forum is acting goofy. Messages are appearing and disappearing but it ain't me folks. Here's a pic I posted last night that has disappeared.

Rich,

There appears to be two complete copies of the forum on the server and it is randomly jumping back and forth between the two so that there are now current posts on both of them. I am not sure how this can be remedied without loosing things, but there has to be some way.

Paul

Here's 3 more pics near and in Wyatt as this area progresses towards a final version. I mostly added in vegetation refinements before these pics were taken.

I would estimate this pic is a good mile from Wyatt. You're looking up from a revine as the FLC unit passes by.

Coming round the bend. Here the double track siding bends to eventually to conform with Wyatt a 1/2 mile or so ahead of us.

Looking back at Wyatt. When you get your chance to be at the controls take this approach at 20mph and you'll be in for a treat as the feel is very authentic.

Rich Garber

I meant to mention that with double track placement, I used light grades to keep those annoying bumps where the tracks meet, smooth.

Rich Garber

And here's the latest Thompson progress report. The map screen below shows progress in laying track up to the entrance to the Steel Mill. New scenery placement past Darling has gained maybe a tile but more importantly as shown by the orange transparent bar near the bottom of the map screen, near finalization of about half the route is complete. I say near finalization because it's real easy for me to spot an area I may want to add something still. Also note that the fourth passing siding is now in place too.

Rich Garber

I haven't done any route building myself, so I don't know how big a tile is. How many miles to the tile are there? And I counted 16 new tiles on the Thompson extension, for my reference, how many tiles are there from Canton to Suddenly?

Thanks
Kerry

A tile is 1.25 miles about. So my guess is Thompson is about 16 miles; probably a little more, say 20. Adding up all the route mileage using the same guessing formula, CST is about 39 tiles. So my guess the route is somewhere between 40 and 50 miles long not counting the branchlines which would add probably another 5 miles or more.

Rich Garber

Rich,

Loking excellent as always !! A town named "Darling" might beg the question ... are we on the way to "Clementine"

Bob K.

Hey, look what I found!

Kerry

Actually, I believe that tankcar refers to the Darling Soap rendering company. I'm reading a book on the ford rouge plant that I got for xmas and it mentions that there was a Darling Soap company across the rouge river from the ford rouge complex.

LHW

Oh sure, just shoot me down with facts!

Kerry

And here I thought I came up with a name so original, so life-like, so desireable... and somebody already has it plastered all over a tanker car no less. Well... back to the drawing board.

Actually, the real name of the town is Dearing. I don't care for that so I changed it to Darling. For the longest time when I saw the markers in the route editor, the letters are misshaped and I thought they read Ocarina. I think that's some kind of musical instrument. Just mindless rambling here.

Rich G

Hey Rich?....Shaddap and werk on yer route!!!....lol

As if I have any room to talk eh?

Ah well, back to TSM and PSP7

Bill

Actually, we have a town here called "Hell" , Michigan.......how bout takin a train to Hell?

or try driving the "Train from Hell"...hehe

LHW

Significant progress is being made on the route on a daily basis. Today I was able to finalize a large percentage of the route as indicated in the blue progress bar on the progress map shown below. In addition though I can't show it on the map, tracks into the steel mill was laid. This was not so easy of a task as I didn't know the size or just how the tracks in the steel mill will go. Plus the location itself is interesting. Tomorrow if all goes as plan the orange progress bar should extend all the way up to Darling. And if all goes well the next day, then hopefully the blue progress bar will extend up to Darling. The plan here is to leave the last period of this route working solely in the steel mill area. Once this area is completed the last pass through of the route is where I will add the 'track objects', car spawners and cars. At this time I also plan to do the barren trees and snow textures. Once all this is done the route goes into beta and activities will be made. The rollingstock appears to be moving along nicely according to Marv. Dick is on vacation this week so don't expect to hear anything much about the rollingstock until Dick returns. I've decided to create the installer for this new rollingstock package to keep all the 'official' rollingstock installers consistent with the route installers. Makes things easier to explain. From what I hear and have seen you can expect this rollingstock file to be approximately 11 megs.

I'm sure there's a few concerned about frame rates. So far I am seeing very decent frame rates. And remember this extension features more mainline running than switching. I don't expect the steel mill to be much of a drag on fps either but we may use some trickery to make sure of that and populate the mill yard with plenty of cars. I'm talking dummy hoppers filling up tracks that won't be used. I plan on doing this differently than other people have done though. The tracks underneath the dummy cars will be real tracks. This way if you prefer to use your own cars all you have to do is go into the route editor and delete the dummy cars. You can then either place your own dummy cars on the track or go into and edit the textures for the dummy cars.

Rich Garber