NYOW Wooden Coaling Tower

[GreatNortherner]

Hi,

A project I have been working on for a loooong time now. Made for a MSTS route of two colleages, this will eventually become a new model for RW too. It's a model of the NYO&W's gigantic four-track coaling tower at Middletown, NY.

In case anyone is interested I can upload a working (interactive but not animated or even halfways finished) version of this in case you would like to place it on a route, as a sort of placeholder maybe.

Still a long way to go though.


Cheers!
Michael

[kin3]

Looking good. Cannot have too much steam era items.

[Toripony]

VERY cool looking! I have no where to put something that big but I LIKE it!

RW needs more WOODEN assets, period. With the game being so European based, it seems like almost everything is stone or concrete. I've taken to repainting some of the stuff with good old American wood textures.

Tori

[thecanadianrail]

i would recomend uploading it after you add a feaw features such as doors and a coal shoot opening. it doesn't halfto be animated for me, it just hasto load coal into the tender. i would be happy after that. great work, i can see good things comming from you in the future!

[ozinoz]

You do great work Michael...

Have to agree though - you cant have too many steam age assets :)

Look forward to seeing its release, in any form



Grant

[thecanadianrail]

any updates?

[GreatNortherner]

Time to bring this one alive again...
... with good news: the model is somewhat finished and working fine!

Granted, it is a not a complete model, if you look closer. From the distance it looks fine, but on closer inspection you'll notice a whole lot of stuff missing, especially all the chains, gears, and whatever there is on a real-world coaling tower. Also, this model has no shadow object and no snow textures. And still it has 3200 polys!

Anyhoo... is somebody willing to test this model? It seems to work fine on my RW, but it is a bit strange to set it up, and also it's my first fully self-built and animated transfer point, so I'd like to make sure it really works.

Here's the download link to the beta package: http://golden-age-rails.com/temp/NYOW-Coaling.rwp
It installs to assets \ GreatNortherner \ SteamEra. I'll leave it online for a few days. If somebody tests this, I'd appreciate if you could let me know if it does or doesn't works, or if you notice something that needs more work.

Placement might be a bit tricky. The main building is only a static scenery item. Additionally, there are two "chute" objects, inner and outer, these are the actual interactive coal transfer point objects which you must link to the tracks. Placement of these can be a bit tricky, but as the real world model had (I think) eight of these chutes, but four looks good too, I wanted to keep their placement as flexible as possible.

Also, I didn't find a way to build one transfer point with four track links and four separate animations, so each track seems to need its own, animated, interactive transfer object. Hence you also need to add four (2 inner, 2 outer) chutes to the main model in the world editor. The hopper unloading shed can become home of one of the "freight - coal unloading" objects. Then you'd have five tracks through this tower, one for unloading hoppers, four for filling up your tenders.

The animations are from the default coal loader and look a bit weird, but this is as good as I could get them to look. It might be possible to tweak them a bit more, so the coal would actually 'slide along' the chutes, but I got hopelessly confused by all the numbers in the blueprint -- and was also just satisfied with how it looks now.

Cheers,
Michael

PS, some screenshots of how it should look like:

[imnew]

Sharp as alway Michael . Looks great !