Railworks America

On a digital version of a curve and gradient chart a friend sent me for the line I've started working on, my calculations indicate that 84 transition pieces will be required over this 1100-1200 metre section of track. It's just something you occasionally encounter when you undertake the task of track laying, but this is just crazy.



I'm still going to lay it, but I've never seen such a strange section relating to undulating terrain. It's not a particularly hilly area. It's just a narrow gauge shortline that was built on a shoestring budget in the 1920s.

I'm just wondering, what's the hardest track laying task one has faced in Railworks? This is a bit of PITA, but it's not like it's on sharp continuous curves which would make even more annoying. It's still going to be easier than laying Adelaide yard.

The majority of the Siskiyou line that I'm building is a constantly curving mess of track. The worst section I can think of is just below the summit on the East side. It took me a day and a half to get it right. By transition piece, do you mean the different radius sections of each curve?

No i mean 1 in whatever. It's equivalent to the percentage or whatever it is used in the US. To get to a 1 in 45 gradient, it takes 8-9 pieces of transition pieces to get to the gradient, otherwise you end up with rough track that changes in an instant, and looks non prototypical.

SAR704 wrote:...it takes 8-9 pieces of transition pieces to get to the gradient, otherwise you end up with rough track that changes in an instant, and looks non prototypical.

Do you not know of the gradient smooth tool?

And FWIW, any route built to spec will have hundreds, if not thousands, of changing grades. It all comes down to where you draw the line tho'. Tehachapi, for example, has over a thousand grade changes in 87 miles, each set as the profile called for. Even my old Selkirk route, which was only 17 miles in length, had several hundred - and the route was more or less visually flat!

There's nothing wrong with using the terrain to ballpark the grade, but the gradient smooth tool is an absolute necessity.

In terms of gradients, I was lucky to have access to track charts for the entire length of the North Shore Line. Once I finished, everything largely balanced out, save for a few places. For a railroad based in Illinois, it sure wasn't flat!

In terms of actual track laying, these were a lot of fun to work out:

Hack wrote:

SAR704 wrote:...it takes 8-9 pieces of transition pieces to get to the gradient, otherwise you end up with rough track that changes in an instant, and looks non prototypical.

Do you not know of the gradient smooth tool?

And FWIW, any route built to spec will have hundreds, if not thousands, of changing grades. It all comes down to where you draw the line tho'. Tehachapi, for example, has over a thousand grade changes in 87 miles, each set as the profile called for. Even my old Selkirk route, which was only 17 miles in length, had several hundred - and the route was more or less visually flat!

There's nothing wrong with using the terrain to ballpark the grade, but the gradient smooth tool is an absolute necessity.

Haven't used it for so long that I completely forgot about it. But just tested it on a newly laid piece of track, and it worked fine. But now when I go to a previously laid section where there's an error that I made and I try to smoothen it, TS does the crash that it loves doing.

I am not an expert on track files, so I might as well stick to doing it manually for now. There's only a few kilometres to go for the route I'm doing anyway.

Speaking of hard track, I can only imagine how long this would take in MSTS, using dynamic track, and placing the grade transition pieces manually.

It's a fictional route though what is semi-mountainous terrain for about 10 kilometres between otherwise more or less flat portions. It's not finished yet (in regards to transitions etc). I was just looking for an alignment that kept the ruling grade to 1 in 80, as opposed to the 1 in 33 which I used on more or less the same alignment last year. It was interesting though, particularly the two hairpins.