Show us your... railroads and GLR

[art128]

Willy, this is just... Waow. beautiful.

[rooker1]

Very interesting indeed. 
I never think about doing such rail lines.....I usually give up or take a different way.

Arthur just PM'd me and thinks you deserves a K-point for being so ingenious.....I have to agree with him!

Robin

[noahclem]

Looks great Willy    I always love your realism. Out of curiosity, does a .5% grade correspond to a rail slope value of .5 in reader?

Great work on the k-point!

[kbieniu7]

Wow! Truly realistic! I have to face height differences too, but it never looks such smooth like in your picture 

[jdenm8]

To answer Noah's question, for every unit of distance you move, you move 0.5% of that distance vertically. In SC4, that would correspond to 16 x 0.005, or 0.08 I think. (for every 1600cm forward, you move 8cm vertically)

As for the pic, that looks fantastic! I've seen pictures of real ones (including one looping around a mountaintop on a continous trestle structure) but I've never been satisfied with my SC4 efforts.

[Kitsune]

wow... that reminds me of the CP spiral tunnels in British Columbia... heres a pick of what this would look like in real life:



And yes - that train is passing under it's own cars.

[Haljackey]

Wow.

Was that through the work of a slope mod or was that all terraformed by yourself? Freaking amazing work!

[Swordmaster]

Thanks for the responses, folks. This thing was actually a result of testing my slope mod, trying to cross the Wasatch range on dobdriver's Salt Lake City map. It's pretty though, which is exactly the point. Takes about an entire large city full of curves, tunnels and bridges to gain/drop 150m.

Willy, this is just... Waow. beautiful.

Thanks for the K-point 

Looks great Willy    I always love your realism. Out of curiosity, does a .5% grade correspond to a rail slope value of .5 in reader?

From my experiments, I've learned this:

[tabular type=4]
[row]
[head]MaxSlopeAlongNetwork[/head]
[head]Grade[/head]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.2865[/data]
[data]0.50%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.5730[/data]
[data]1.00%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.8595[/data]
[data]1.50%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]1.1460[/data]
[data]2.00%[/data]
[/row]

[/tabular]

These were tested over a distance of 4000m (250 tiles), so I'd say they're pretty accurate. Of course, that is, if you consider 1 tile = 16m.

Wow.

Was that through the work of a slope mod or was that all terraformed by yourself? Freaking amazing work!

Both; I started from the top, so I had to terraform the terrain down, then let the slope mod bring it back up to get the maximum grade downward. The cool thing is, you can't put in the wide curves unless you lessen the grade, which is quite realistic.

Cheers,
Willy

[woodb3kmaster]

These were tested over a distance of 4000m (250 tiles), so I'd say they're pretty accurate. Of course, that is, if you consider 1 tile = 16m.

If I may say so, there's actually no need to experiment to find the right values for MaxSlopeAlongNetwork - all you need is a bit of trigonometry. Since we know that the value of MaxSlopeAlongNetwork is in degrees, and grade is just the tangent of the angle of the network, all we have to do to find the right value for a given desired grade is take the arctangent of that grade. Using this method, here are some improved values, truncated to eight decimal places:

[tabular type=4]
[row]
[head]MaxSlopeAlongNetwork[/head]
[head]Grade[/head]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.28647651[/data]
[data]0.50%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.57293870[/data]
[data]1.00%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]0.85937224[/data]
[data]1.50%[/data]
[/row]

[row]
[data]1.14576284[/data]
[data]2.00%[/data]
[/row]

[/tabular]

These values will always be correct regardless of the size of an in-game cell (which, for the record, is known to be 16m).

I hope you don't mind me offering this bit of correction, Willy - I love seeing the work you've put into getting realistic grades in SC4, and I only wanted to offer some helpful information. As it stands, your rail spiral looks fantastic!

[Swordmaster]

Thanks, Zack.

If I may say so, there's actually no need to experiment to find the right values for MaxSlopeAlongNetwork - all you need is a bit of trigonometry. Since we know that the value of MaxSlopeAlongNetwork is in degrees, and grade is just the tangent of the angle of the network, all we have to do to find the right value for a given desired grade is take the arctangent of that grade.

Oh, just that. 

Mathematics was never my thing. It's hard enough in Dutch, never mind in English!


:

These values will always be correct regardless of the size of an in-game cell (which, for the record, is known to be 16m).

I hope you don't mind me offering this bit of correction, Willy - I love seeing the work you've put into getting realistic grades in SC4, and I only wanted to offer some helpful information. As it stands, your rail spiral looks fantastic!

Of course I don't mind - better is always better! In my first mods I hadn't even realized I could use decimal places.

Cheers
Willy

[sim_link]

That spiral is stunning, Swordmaster. Required or not, one of the best examples of rail I've seen. Fantastic work!

[Swordmaster]

Because you all seemed to like it so much, here's some snapshots from the climb I took last night at work in the game:










This one's a bigger spiral, about 35m height gain:




You know this one:

wow... that reminds me of the CP spiral tunnels in British Columbia... heres a pick of what this would look like in real life:

And yes - that train is passing under it's own cars.

This one's for you, my friend 







That's all folks.

Of course, this train is impossible to pull with just one engine, but I don't see a way to put engines in the middle or rear of the train (where they would be needed for 80+ coal cars).

Cheers
Willy

[art128]

Oh my.

[mike3775]

Oh my.

He is just showing off, and nobody likes a showoff 

(I am kidding swordmaster, that is simply awesome what you did and the K point was well earned)

[Kitsune]

yep - it is truly epic. Awesome job !

[Haljackey]

Well, Willy's little rail adventure was so awesome it deserves a karma point. Well done! 

[dedgren]

Very cool railway engineering!


David

[rooker1]

WOW....
Obviously some do like a show off.....you have managed to wake up David.
Awesome work!!

Robin

[noahclem]

Excellent work again    You know, you could have a few pretty nice MD updates just from collecting a few of the posts you've made around here--just sayin 

It is a shame about the limitation regarding multiple engines. Wouldn't they normally be all at the front and back and not in the middle like you mentioned? If they could be mixed randomly in I suppose you could have an engine computed as a car, though to have the approximately 1 in 20 cars be engines you'd need 20 more coal trucks in your automata folder. Alternately, the engine automata file could be two engines rendered in a row but I suppose there wouldn't be a way to make them bend in the middle. Could look nice on straightaways though 

[io_bg]

A well-deserved K-point!