@Snuffy - Model Railroad Layout question at TS

[rgarber]

Snuffy,

Sorry, I saw you asked a question over at TS.com about Model Railroad layouts and my password is on my main computer which I'm not on currently. I just saw this post asking about if you can trace a model railroad layout into Railworks. The answer is yes and that's how I did both the R&C and C&N routes. It's not difficult but it will literally wear your arms out. What you do is use Mosaic to layout markers. Then you convert them to Railworks markers. How you get your markers in place is... and don't anyone laugh... is you tape the track plan to your monitor and hope you can see through the paper easily enough. There's no real limitation to this except your working with an 8.5 x 11" piece of paper on the screen. And you want to be careful you don't map your trackplan over a huge area. With a little practice you'll get good at estimating how large your route will be. Leave the grid on in Mosaic so you can estimate. I think one MSTS tile is about 4 Railworks tiles.

The only problem with doing this is because the track layout isn't linear you could run into areas where you have tiles right up against each other that are heavily populated if you're a detail freak like I am. That was about the only drawback. The advantage is route building goes incredibly fast when you use this method. Scenes you lay down in one place become the background for other places. So placement is pretty quick.

It's been over a year since I did this method and I don't think I can recall specific details so good luck with this. But yep, it can be done.

Rich