[Genma Saotome]

Two companies shared the same industrial spur in Berkeley, just south of Heinz St -- Durkee Foods (owned by Glidden) and the San Francisco Sulphur Company (owned by Stauffer Chemicals).

The Durkee plant processed a lot of raw copra which was imported at the Port of Oakland, pressing it to make copra oil, which in turn was made into Margarine and Salad Dressing. Judging by the location of shipping docks it appears most (all?) of these edibles where shipped locally by truck.

The San Francisco Sulphur Plant, built in 1929, sublimated (purified) raw sulfur by turning into a gas and capturing pure sulfur in what was in essence, the cooling pipes of a still. I have no evidence in-hand of where they got the sulfur or in what form it was shipped. I'm going to assume the inputs came from nearby oil and lead refineries and was shipped as molten sulfur to its parent company, Stauffer's, whose west coast facilities were a few miles away. Sulfur is molten above 115C and in today's rail world is almost the only way sulfur is shipped.

Some images:

Looking east across the SP main towards the Durkee Plant.




Looking east down the length of the spur -- not a lot of side-to-side room here.




A telephoto shot of the same view. Given the tight space and length of this spur I decided to super-detail what's on the walls on each side. Very short LOD's keep most of these extra polys from having much of a performance hit on the main.




Pushing a car thru the loading/unloading area of two of the SF Sulphur warehouse. I havn't added the shipping doors or docks yet, but as you can see, very close quarters here too.




Standing on top of a boxcar while being pushed along side one of the subliming plants. The tankcar loading is seen in the distance.




A tank car spotted for loading. It took me a while to track down useful photos of what a molten sulfur loading dock looks like. This doesn't have all of the details but serves pretty well as-is.




Looking down on the molten sulfur loading from the roof of the adjacent warehouse.




An overview of the SF Sulphur plant, looking west.



An overview of the Durkee Foods plant looking SW.


In both of the last two shots you can notice the visual effect one gets by pushing the near terrain view distance out to 10k and DM view distance out well beyond that -- the far shoreline and hills can be seen where they actually are. Naturally one needs tiles w/ terrain to accomplish that. Last year I added a huge number of tiles on each side of the ROW to support imaging at long distances. It works on this route because in many places there is a lot of flat land with mountains off in the distance. All those extra tiles would very likely be a waste of disk space on a fully mountainous route where nearby peaks and ridges are in the way.

[paulytechnic]

Wow, that's looking great! I'd say it's very worth it to have those extra tiles with the distant hills; that area just wouldn't look right without them. Also, nice texturing on those buildings (especially since they're right in your face with such close quarters!)

[Stephen Hjellum]

Looks like you're doing fine without me, Dave. How much more effort are you putting into the East Bay before heading towards the Valley?

[conductorchris]

Really fabulous, Dave. Nobody does urban industrial as well as you. Nice texturing indeed. Nice mosiac work too (although I'm struck that those sidings have rather more ballast than I'd expect).
Christopher

[delamate]

Very nice work. I am happy to see that this route is still in progress.

John DeLamater

[ConrailSD45]

Wow, excellent work. I'm really liking what I see here.

[Genma Saotome]

A few texture changes to the molten sulfur loading apparatus:


I made a rubber hose texture and modified what I was using for the metal parts in the walkway and feed valve.

My pixel editor (Corel's Photo Paint X6) allows me to do some funky stuff w/ layers (I'm not at all sure of what's going on but I do know how to fiddle the settings until I see something I like). It's like this: Take two layers. Do a fill on the lwoer one of any solid color. Find an interesting texture somewhere of rust, or peeling paint, or wood grain, pretty much anything that is mostly abstract and slide that onto the top layer. Start messing around w/ special functions. I see this list of two dozen special functions, starting w/ normal followed by stuff like Add, Subtract... if lighter, if darker... texturize, color, hue... overlay... soft light, hard light, dodge, burn, and so on. You use one of these on the top layer. What each one does is control how much of the top layer bleeds thru on to the lower layer. Playing w/ opacity of the top layer has an effect too.

This is evident in both the red on the valve and gray on the walkway. Both of those use the same top layer (a rust sample I found online) but a completely different bottom layer. In these examples, the rust color does not pass thru but the difference of light and dark does and that causes the patchiness in what would otherwise be a solid gray or solid red.


The base red.



The original rust image.



Special function applied to the rust layer



As seen in-game.


The more I play with this stuff the more satisfied I am that my textures are coming out better.

My final tasks here will be to assess whether I can combine several small textures, like these, into one larger texture and get rid of a couple draw calls in the process.

[cnwfan]

Excellent work! I use to work in Berkeley at Consolidated Printers, which is at 8th and Carleton. We would occasionally get railcars of paper that SP would spot at our warehouse across the street.

Howard

[Genma Saotome]

Any of these look familiar? They're quite incomplete but as stand ins for now, they'll do. For me, adding good windows and and a lesser degree doors, is hard. Most photos of windows reflect too much sky... or the photographer, parked cars, whatever. I don't think my paining talent is good enough for me to whip up something from scratch.

8th at Carlson looking north



On 8th and Parker(?) looking south.

In the 50's that was Ames-Harris-Neville. They made burlap bags. The building is still there. Am I correct in understanding the AHN bldg in the screenshots is the warehouse you mentioned? Where exactly did you work?

[cnwfan]

Oh yea... that looks very familiar! You did a nice job capturing the look of the building. We had a problem with cars parking along (and even on) the warehouse track... even though there was a "plain as day" red no parking line and signage that was supposed to keep cars from parking on the track. I remember on one day, I helped the conductor "bounce" a small import off the track that was just in the foul. Our section of the warehouse was at the 8th and Carleton end. We had about 1/4 of the total warehouse space. It was mainly used for storing our roll stock for the web presses.

Also, the spur crossed Carleton and extended about 1 railcar into the next block. One day, the SP spotted one of our empties across the street. The folks working in the building were upset, as a 50' boxcar was occupying their parking spots.

I rode out the 89' earthquake in the top floor there at Consolidated (the tan building across the street from the warehouse at 8th and Carleton). My boss was one of the last cars to drive off the upper deck of the 880 Cypress section. It fell down as he was making the curve near Broadway. We usually left at the same time, and as I was the slower driver, I was usually about 1 mile behind him by the time we got to downtown Oakland. If I hadn't stayed late to check one last estimate that evening, I would have been right on top of the Cypress section when it fell. Someone was looking out for me that evening. BTW... have you tried that Mexican place up the street on Carleton? I believe it was called Juans. The mole sauce was excellent!

Howard