Railworks America

I started playing around with the route editor a few weeks ago and have met some mild success, and now I'm thinking about starting a new route as a project for my spare time and I decided on building a section of the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range railroad, probably as a donationware project. I plan on recreating the lines from Proctor just west of Duluth to Iron Junction which is about 60 miles, and the line east from Proctor into Duluth and the Port of Duluth, and then on to Two Harbors, another 25 miles or so. I would possibly consider also including the line north from Two Harbors to Mesaba and then west to Iron Junction which would bring the total distance to just under two hundred miles, and bring the route full circle and include the entirety of the lines the railroad owned at the turn of the 21st century just before it was purchased by the CN, though that will be a decision to be made depending on how long it takes to do the first half. Perhaps as a project for next summer when I'm home from school. But I digress. I'm from MN and the DM&IR has always been one of my favorite roads, and It's a gorgeous area that I hopefully would be able to faithfully recreate for Railworks. Would there be any interest in this? I mean, I know there's a bit of a lack of 3rd party routes for RailWorks and I'd rather not spend a lot of time on this only to find people wouldn't be terribly excited to simulate a railroad that spent over 100 years hauling nothing but iron ore and taconite through the Northwoods of Minnesota. In all seriousness, feeback here would be appreciated. If there isn't much interest in this I'll model a different route that more people would like to see

This all being said, I would also need a bit of help with rolling stock, I'm utterly useless with PhotoShop and I know there are some talented repainters here, if there is anyone willing to make DM&IR skins for a couple locomotives as well as the iron ore car, the author of which escapes me. I may be willing to pay for your time. I also am curious if there are any models similar to these ore docks, or anything else that could be used as a passable substitute? If anybody would be interested in contributing just let me know, if I get enough interest I'll get started up ASAP!

Sounds like a neat project. GAR's SD9 would probably make a good candidate for creating a new SD18: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=2639&start=45

I say go for it! I think it would be a great line to model for sure. The ore docks should be interesting, if you decided to solicit help in creating models for that.

Trevor

Hack wrote:Sounds like a neat project. GAR's SD9 would probably make a good candidate for creating a new SD18: http://www.railworksamerica.com/forum/v ... 9&start=45

Yeah, I was thinking of that. DM&IR had a large fleet of SD9s and SD18s so that works out well with Michael's recent release of his SD9.

TDHenderson wrote:I say go for it! I think it would be a great line to model for sure. The ore docks should be interesting, if you decided to solicit help in creating models for that.

Trevor

Yeah, when I get home from work tonight I'll do some searching around to see if there's anything out there like that already, but I'll probably have to hire somebody to model that as well.

Twin Ports native here, and I think this is a great idea! Seeing the twin ports area modeled in Railworks would be awesome!

Sounds like a good idea.

But for being a donationware route you'd also have to model your own assets. You could probably use all default assets, but you couldn't use any assets from a payware route, or freeware assets.

jpetersjr wrote:Sounds like a good idea.

But for being a donationware route you'd also have to model your own assets. You could probably use all default assets, but you couldn't use any assets from a payware route, or freeware assets.

Aah, that was something that hadn't occured to me...I guess it'll just be freeware then. No biggie

So I did get started on the route and have a portion of the yard at Proctor, MN laid out, I just need to figure out how to get the minimum radius of the track tighter so I can get the yard track as close to real life as possible...But I may have picked a bad time to start a big project like this less than a week before I move to college. This will probably be a very slow going but I'll do my best. I'll keep you guys posted on how it's going when I get settled in at school and see how much time I'll have but like I said, this is probably not going to go terribly fast.

The_Garbear wrote:I just need to figure out how to get the minimum radius of the track tighter so I can get the yard track as close to real life as possible...

Adjust the minimum radius for the passenger section in the chosen TrackRules file. I usually set mine to 111, which allows for very sharp curves in yards and industry tracks. You can then go back over the line to set everything as mainline, freight, or whatever as needed.

Update: I will most certainly not have time to be working on this while I'm here at college. I'll have about a month during December and January, I should be able to get some more done then.