After months of pretty much silence about our Southern Pacific Cal-P Route (Sacramento to Oakland 1950) I have a few progress screens. We are using Scale Rail and have rebuilt the whole route from the ground up. The grades are as close to accurate as is humanly possible with MSTS and we have also been refinning several new ideas as we progress.
Now as for the "modern" equipment in the pics, I just did a full reinstall of MSTS and have not installed the 1950 equipment.

Track #1 pproaching the Suisun Bay Bridge, track #2 is behind us on a different grade.

Crossing the Sacramento River overflow basin on one of the many trestles that fill the stretch between Sacramento and Davis. This area is usually floods in winter when the river nears the top of its banks. The Gov't opens weirs further up stream to ease the pressure on the levees in the area. During summer this is rich agriculture land.

Erik,

Inspiring screenshots ! Your strategy is absolutely on target . In running the enhanced Cajon Pass route, as well as my own replacement in Tehachapi II, ScaleRail is the top of the heap. Kudos for the bridgework and trestles! I pass these landmarks each day between Benicia and West Sacramento, and you and your team have hit the proverbial nail on the head. I can see and feel the steam and early diesels plying this route--without even having the route.

When the Cal-P is complete, the community will have yet another key part of California railroading and history in its hands. I am sure there is lots more to do, but no matter the wait, I will be in line for the finished product. Great vision and great work !

Keep sluggin'

Dave

Dude,

do you know I almost gave up on that route??? THIS must be one of those routes I eagerly await yet don't talk about every day because you simply do not hear much about them (no pun intended).

Seriously guys, awesome work. As Dave, I'll be right in line when you guys actually come out with it!

EDIT: Mixed up names...

Thanks Guys, this past year has been quite a challenge and comments such as these every few months help us out. We hope to have some more good news in a month or so.

Happily waiting to run Marc's F'Units on it

Thanks,
Jonathan

Geez Erik, now you got me slobbering all over my shirt again.

I, like quite a few others, have been quietly and patiently waiting for this route to come to fruition. Be assured that interest has not lagged in the least - at least on my part, and that when it's ready you will have my order.

The hard work you are putting into it shows in your shots. It looks supurb and I have no doubt it will be a very high quality product.

Take your time and don't burn yourself out!

Larry Steiner

Erik, That definatly looks really really nice

OMG! You got me all worked up! I hate you! I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!

Yeah I have been looking forward to this particular route as well! Can't wait to see the splendor of a 50's California been revitalised in VScale.

Have thoroughly enjoyed the engines purchased from you guys (UP SD90 set "Digitrains?") and look forward to this creation as well. That area of California encompasses a lot of different scenery will it all be part of this route?

Have a GR-8 day & "God Bless" ..... Don

Don, do you have something specific in mind about the scenery or are you asking where the route actually goes?

Here is a new shot from the Crockett area. The scenery is incomplete, but you can see the bridge for US40 in the background. The engines are only in beta status.

Wow man that looks nice, even though part of the bridge is floating, it looks awesome, any update on this, I am really getting excited to see this out. No rush since you have the new job, justa anxious Iguess

Thanks alot and thanks for building this fine looking route,
Jonathan

Someone get Larry a bib

Erik,
Do you have any shots of the depot in Crockett? When I lived in the north bay area, I belonged to a Ntrak (N scale) club that had a layout in the old baggage room.

A lot of work going in the Oakland / Emeryville / Berkeley area of the route. This has a lot of heavy industry and the switching opportunities are considerable.

The major task right now is getting the buildings done and there are a lot of them to do. We have copies of the Sanborn maps from ~1950 as well as SP engineering dept maps so the location and footprint information is well documented. The appearance of each however, is harder to come by as a lot of this area has been redeveloped (e.g., Emeryville is home to Pixar, the movie animators). So naturally there's a need for some creativity under the circumstances.

If you're interested in lending a hand on this, drop me a note.

Sorry for the delay in replying to this, my main computer went down and I am on my wife's laptop now for a bit.
I do have a few pics of the crockett depot in the sim, but they were on the HD and are now lost unless I want to pay about 500 to recover all the data.

That's a major bummer! Don't you just love 'puters....they always act up at the most inopertune time! I'll be looking forward to the Cal-P.....I miss the north Bay area.

Check out this thread at Elvas Tower for a couple of update shots.....

http://www.elvastower.com/forums/index.php...?showtopic=1153

Mykel

Screens have been deleted to comply with forum rules...even though the rules only say they apply to the Screen Shot Forum

Eric,
Looks GREAT!

But Marc has an 800x600 pic posting rule. Would be noce to be able to see w/o scrolling right to left.

Charles, those shots over at Elvas Tower are 1600 x 1200 taken on my 21" monitor, which is the norm on my PC. I posted them that size so folks could see how much you get at that resolution. Next time I put some out there I'll use a smaller size.

Between West Sacramento and Davis on the Yolo Causeway

No worries - we'll soon have in place a means to allow whatever size, and it won't affect the forum screen. I'll announce when ready.

And yes, the screens look great!

Cheers!
Marc

Spot on! Now that is the Cal-P! Not to mention, the Fairfield-Vacaville-Dixon area.

This one has definitely been worth the wait.

Dave

Dave,
it is slowly coming together with Dave's expertise.

I have posted another screen at the above link (the one Dave posted a few days ago) that just did not look right scaled down to 800x600. It is in the Berkely area or just a bit east showing some of the industrial section.

For those interested, the site www.sacramentolocomotivworks.com is also being updated.....

Thanks Erik for the tip. That Berkeley shot is awesome!

Dave

Awesome!!!

Nice job guys! Though i wish you wouldnt have taken my modeler

Just out of curiosity, about when will it be realeased?

Hi fmarket,

The best answer I can give is it will be released when it gets done, we are working on it quite actively and there is no date set for its release. Keep your eyes on this space though.

I've long maintained that route builders are missing a commercial opportunity in not creating "era ad-ons" to their routes. Once the majority of the work is done for a route, changing era isn't often a significant amount of work (small changes in track structure, buildings, rolling stock, etc.) and could produce new markets.

For example, I already own Cajon Pass, but would easily pay again to have it back dated to, say, the 1950s. I'm sure those who like the modern era would do the same for a route like Donner Pass.

No, they haven't. They have released equipment from a previous era to run on the lines, true enough.

But they haven't changed things like: bidirectional signalling; the dreaded line change at Summit (put back the yards, wye, depot, section houses and operators houses, caboose cutoff track, etc); the removal of the 1967 SP Palmdale Cutoff; the restoration of the shops and original yards at San Bernardino; the restoration of the original Barstow Yard and shops; and the eastern connection to the Mojave district from the mainline on the Cajon Pass Route.

They haven't: restored the SP and Santa Fe shops to Bakersfield; restored the original Santa Fe Bakersfield Depot; removed the wind generators from the hills; retored the roundhouse and shops at Mojave on Tehachapi Pass II.

There has also been no restoration of fuel and water stations for the steam engines they have provided.

So no, they haven't. Nor do they seem to be inclined to do so.

As I think about this issue you've raised I'm pretty sure an era change would be easier if you were going from a much older date to the modern era than it would be to back date something.

My reasoning is that like the real railroads, the change from old to current involves mostly deletions and maybe just a few additions. The other way around would likely require a fair bit of additions and changes to track, if nothing more than to add a lot more local industries. And if you're going to switch a site, it might as well look halfway decent, so there may be a fair bit of artwork that's needed too. Adding those industrial sites might very well break up existing nodes and we all know that once signalling is in you really don't want to be changing your .tdb

So I think unless you planned for it upfront by reserving way back when a clean, track completed, non-signalled copy of the route, you're going to have a hard time, perhaps impossible time, back dating the modern route.

You are absolutely right, Dave. The Summit of Cajon pass is a classic example of what you speak. There were originally many yard tracks, a wye, buildings, roads and contours not found there today and they were all another 50 feet or so higher than the existing track.

The modern version has two straight mainlines with a set of crossovers. In order to do that area justice the whole route would have to be planned around that track arrangement at Summit. It would be impossible to backdate such a drastically changed area. And which era do you choose? ATSF/UP only without the Palmdale Cutoff as in pre 1965 or so (anything beyond that had earth movers all over the hill!)? 1967 ATSF/UP and SP? 1970 after the line change? You just can't please everybody!

I was in hopes that Patrick Wise would have done the original Summit in his version, as he did the original Redondo Junction with the killer 15 MPH curve and without the flyover, but alas. I'm just so pleased with his LA to San Bernardino that I can't fault his decisions in any way.

In retrospect, it may be a wise thing to do routes like you are, back in the days of steam. Then they could be updated by lopping off things, just as real railroads have done. Unfortunately, there are too few of us vintage guys around to support such a path for too many routes.

Thanks!

I see your points, but Cajon is also an extreme example of wholesale track and alignment changes. For other routes, such as Stevens Pass or Donner Pass, the changes wouldn't be nearly as drastic.

Since I assume that the choice of era must sometimes be a contentious one for route creators, it surprises me that this hasn't been done yet as a sort of compromise.

I think another possibility of why there are not multiple era routes is that by the time a given route is completed the creator(s) are pretty well sick and tired of it and are ready to move on to something completely different and more exciting. Mowing the lawn fer instance.

For myself, I would not be interested in updating the Cal-P to the modern era as I'm not at all interested in the modern era. Mowing the lawn really would be more interesting!

Just found this topic and am wondering if Cal-P is still a working project or was ever finished and offered to the public?
Mac

Yes, it is still an active project with progress of one sort or another occuring daily. Quite a bit has been added these past few months in the east bay cities of Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley. As you can expect from any big project, work is not always in a smooth, forward direction but the trend, overall, is positive. In the last year several hundred custom buildings have been constructed, each patterned after the actual buildings on each site.

Most recent was the addition of Oakland's Outer Harbor area. Here's a example of the sort of work being done (n.b., the model shown are not finished) http://www.elvastower.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2090.

Some fun shots I took around Christmas (very large images): http://www.elvastower.com/forums/index.php...st=0#entry13218

At present I'm working w/ Paul Gausden who is adding features to the export plug-in he's written for Google's Sketch-up Cad software.

SLW has also added several new members to help w/ the project.

Glad to hear it is still alive. Any idea when we salivating types can expect it to be ready for the marketplace? Also, will it run under XP?

It will run under XP.
As for a time frame... we are aiming for sometime later this year.

Where's the liberty ships? Or am I too far down river?
Surprised Me, the water is about the right color, as I remember it. Looking good so far.

Joe, we have scale drawings for several ships. You know anybody who wants to build them for us? They're far enough offshore so they don't need to be very detailed and as for skins, well, up until the early 60's all the ships parked in the Ghost Fleet were painted in red oxide so that too should be easy enough.



Heck, I even have track laid under the river... I was even going to make a .eng file for a Victory Ship on it's way up river to Port Chicago... but, no ship on hand.

How about that Guy that put the ones up on Train-sim? A normal Cargo ship or tanker would be appropriate too. Too bad You can't capture the smell from that area too.

Not to be giving my age away or nothing, but I can still remember riding the ferry across from San Rafael to Richmond before the bridge was put in, lots of trackwork in Richmond, doing that too?

Looking great on the Cal-P Line Route will this be a Payware Route.