Hump yard elevations

[hertsbob]

There are two hump yards and one gravity-fed yard in the Woodhead route, by the way.

I've had hump shunting vaguely working, but the only way I found to do it was to remove all braking from the wagons and then to fiddle about with the wagon friction values so I could get them to stop in the yard. I also used a short cut of wagons at the end of each reception siding to act as a buffer so my rolling cars didn't trundle off into the distance...




Once you get over the issue with the braking, the other concern is that there's no way of writing a scenario for this type of shunting. You can allocate each particular cut of wagons to be dropped off at each siding but none of these get acknowledged as it seems that the loco has to physically uncouple from the wagons in the relevant siding before the Dispatcher will recognise it.

[davedingler]

Dave, the accuracy you're asking about will probably only be available (if at all) in 1/9 arcsec data from USGS and there are very limited areas that were scanned at that high resolution. Most of the U.S. data is 1/3 arcsec which probably won't accurately display the depth/height of a hump yard. When I tried this with the Bailey Yard in Nebraska, the hump was fairly close but rounded off and the "pit" was barely discernable when in reality it goes several feet below the surrounding landscape (I forget the exact numbers). So, I laid all the track level, then painstakingly selected 64 gradient markers simultaneously and lowered all the tracks to the grade I wanted, then snapped the terrain to the track. IIRC, I actually set two grades; something like 1.5% at the "head" tapering off to .5%.

The reason your thread keeps going off topic is no one has made this idea work so we don't really know if a prototypical hump yard grade will work or if it will have to be exaggerated. If exaggerated, how much? And then, how do you slow the cars. Ultimately, the answer to your question lies in the brake physics of the rollingstock in the game and how to hack them.

Thanks Tori & all other responders,

The USGS map shows that the 1/9 arcsec data are available in the Houston area and I have downloaded the entire region. I have a "Bat" file to convert the IMG files to BIL files and the BIL file converter, QGIS, to make them usable by RailWorks (Both from 3DTrains web site). However, I have not been able to get the QGIS program to complete the conversion, and am looking for a program that will work with the latest USGS files. If there isn't a program that will work, then I'll employ the old "Fudge Factor Technology" to get something representative of the yard.

As for creating a Scenario for the yard, I'm not into that part of RW yet. I was only thinking of the future if and when I ever get this route complete enough to publish for beta testing, then the yard would be set up for anyone wanting to create a Scenario for hump yard work.

Thanks,

Dave

[Toripony]

I used ReDem to make my terrain. At the time, the in-game import procedure would not preserve the definition of 1/9 data (the old "T" method), so the only way to do it was with ReDem. I don't know if the current Import Terrain tool will preserve that detail or not?