Elvas Tower: NP 1890's 30-ton Link & Pin Flatcar Pack - Elvas Tower

MSTS NORTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD 1890's 30-Ton 36-Ft.FLATCARS
EQUIPPED WITH LINK AND PIN COUPLERS
**HIGH DETAIL WITH MEDIUM POLYGON COUNTS**
MODEL MESH BY TIM MUIR
TEXTURES BY TIM MUIR, WAYNE CAMPBELL (WHEEL FACES) AND CGTEXTURES.COM (weathering source materials).

There are eight NP flatcars and 2 SLS&E drop-bottom gons.

Prototype's General Background.

I could not locate any NP plans, nor any decent photos of NP 1890's flatcars so used the best plan I could find, that of a Southern Pacific class CS-8 of 1894. So this is an SP car with NP Peninsular trucks.

I have included a "bonus" car, Seattle, Lake Shore & Eastern Ry. drop-bottom gondola car which is essentially a flatcar with sides and basic dumping hoppers built into the floor. It was was next to an S.L.S.& E. boxcar and coupled to an N.P. 33-foot box car in an 1889 photo supplied by Steve Thompson. It was a very interesting car that had to be built.

Model Background and Data:

The models were built using Train Sim Modeler Pro by Abacus. They are highly detailed with just over 7,000 polygons (the three NP cars) and 7,400 (the Seattle Lake Shore car). I have given the gondolas 4 levels of detail, or LODs. The flats have none.

Installation and utilization:

Install the usual way, unzip to a temporary folder, copy the contents to your Trainset folder, then make up a consist with the editor of your choice. These cars are equipped link and pin couplers.

There are empty (_mt) and loaded (_ld) wag files for each car. There are four different lumber loads, two log loads and a cord wood load for the flatcars, coal and gravel for the gondolas. These have their own wag files and can be accessed in the consist editor.

I wish to thank the following folks for their assistance along the way:

Steve Thompson, as mentioned, for digging deep in his collections and supplying rare photos. Also supplied the wood chip/bark textures for the log load floor junk textures.

Jim Bebenroth, for testing the cars, supplying bark textures for the log loads and for suggestions.

Anthony W. Thompson, author of "Southern Pacific Freight Cars, Volume 3:Automobile Cars and Flat Cars", which contains the drawings used to build the flat car model.

Tim Muir
Railroad Earth
October the 25th, 2012