[timothyskinner]

So I should answer your question Falcus,

I was working on the Bay Line - "Baldwin" at TS was my partner in the enterprise.

B wanted a modern version with high accuracy of trackage, I wanted a "what might have been", or a "what was there at different times put together" as a "maximum". There were lumber based enterprises all over the area in the triangle between Pensacola, Dothan and Tallahassee. I was an activity writer and player so came from a different direction than B with his railroad background.

There were a series of branch lines off the main east-west between P and T - those shortlines had extraordinary histories.
There were many other logging enterprises off the lines running east and west from Dothan.
There were obvious possibilities of inter-connections for the loggers with the Central Georgia which were not taken.
The Bay Line itself ran north to south from Dothan to Panama City.

Timothy

[timothyskinner]

Hi Markus,

Thank you for your kind welcome.
Yes, I have downloaded OpR and will see how I get on.

As a route builder I would very much like to know how much easier or quicker it is to lay track than MSTS... hahahahaa !
I certainly have to check it out and see what happens.
I know from experience that a MSTS route takes a year to do and that is just trackage, a minimum of scenery and a few buildings from the TS file library.
One thing I am very interested in is collaboaration in a project...

Timothy

[timothyskinner]

Hi Gerry,

So, I have made my way back to your posts about OpR and the 91 routes that run on it...

It looks as though you have made me sharpen my thinking and make a decision on route building.
Definitely need a computer upgrade for OpR.
Is there a particular board for OpR?

As it is, I downloaded 0.9 and the Tallahassee Sub this morning, but haven't opened them yet.
The choice of which route to build is already on the horizon.
It is like the apertif to a fine meal... it should not be hurried...

Timothy

[copperpen]

Hello Timothy

I am the "Baldwin" to whom you refer. I replied to your PM over at TS not long ago. This thread confirms one of my questions in it.


Mervyn

[Falcus]

@Timothy

On the computer stuff, Id actually suggest keeping the vid card you have (Pull it out of the current computer when you get a new one) and spend the money you save on a better set of CPUs with more Ram. Thats not a bad Vid Card, if a bit dated. 2GB of Ram though will hurt ya a bit, particularly if you're running any OS newer then win-XP, and I looked that CPU set up and saw it rated as 2.0 Ghz total, which is kind of meh at this point. Further they were part of a series where, instead of being a true dual core it seems like the more modern dual/quad cores (Where each core can function as an individual Processing unit), AMD seemed to have made one core the "Primary" and then used the second core "in addendum to" to help manage whatever task the first one was... /shrug. This is just my understanding of things, and I might be wrong. I will say that, as I recently read in a recent web article, and I rather agree with, certainly, the more money you spend on a Vid Card, the better your gaming experience will be graphically, though putting a nice new vid card in your computer to me would seem like dropping $4k for Nice shiny new rims on a old beat up Pacer/Gremlin....

My understanding of the Pass' history is that the NP was the first through the Cascades by about half a decade, and that the GN had to scramble to find a suitable pass after the completion of Stampede. I know Snoqualamie (Later to be the MILW Mainline) was definitely passed up by the GN, much to their chagrin as it has since been hailed as one of the best suited and most well engineered out of the three (Which I would agree with, having ridden the length of it on bicycle from Rattle Snake Lake to Easton, BNSF should be still kicking themselves for giving it up to WA State and by proxy AT&T for the fiber-optics line through it). As far as the GN tunnel Boring Stevens, they actually bored 2 tunnels through it, the first one roughly equal to the summit completed about a decade IIRC from the first track laying, and later in the 20's they completed what is to this day one of the longest tunnels in North America some 1000 or more feet below the first, marginally as a result of the Avalanche Disaster at Wellington in ~1912. This second tunnel is what the BNSF uses today.

Be careful trying to bump your post count too much, lol. You'll get there, lord knows theres enough interesting threads on this board to make it hard to resist posting here instead of driving trains, lol.

Yea, I'm marginally aware of route you're talking about. I can definitely understand the dilemma you encountered with your mate. That exact issue is one of many things thats held me back from being more curious about trying to try route building. I too would want to approach it from "How much can we include?" (Being very much a gamer and wanted to get the most bang out of any effort I put forth, lol). I realize however ultimately routes do best when an specific time period is just arbitrarily decided. I will say one of the things I liked about one route I played (It was either Rene Rumps White Fish 9, or one of the incarnations of the RMD East), was that it had old branch lines that had been ripped up years before the modeled era included, but with lots of grass over them near the current RoW to give the appearance of Disuse while you drive past in the current era, but if you wanted to take a more dated locomotive with a more dated consist out, once you got away from the RoW you got into areas that were modeled in an earlier time period. /shrug. Just one solution I know I enjoyed.

Just real quick, a bit of bad news for you and route building, to date OpR does not have any new tools for content creation. So all new routes are still created through all of the old MSTS Tools, lol. Good news is at least Im sure you're still plenty familiar with them! ^^;

Falcus

[timothyskinner]

Hi Falcus,

Yes, the use of grass (see one of O'Brian Jones's routes too) is an excellent working solution. And, it may have been Tehachapi Pass that had "hidden" trackage just below the surface that was not visible until you knew...

You may well be right re Stampede Pass. My reference source was a history of the GN that said little about the NP and used internal GN documents to go on and on in detail about the problems of surveying and appointing good surveyors in the early days. GN certainly had major problems completing the route whereas NP had less without the tunnelling.

Timothy