[wellsburg]

Hi All,

At last, a two-truck NG Shay of reasonable quality. Here she is, just returning from Camp 1 on the Sumpter Valley RR. The crew looks a bit underfed though.



The engine is available at http://www.schmalspursim.de/ Click on Downloads - Dampflokomotiven. Engine is Shay der "Sun Creek Valley Tramway Company" No. 3.

As downloaded, No. 3 is two-foot gauge. With some "Shape File Manager" rescaling, she can grow to an approximate three-foot gauge. Correct rescaling factor for wheel gauge is 1.5 in all directions. However, the body becomes too large in proportion to other three-foot gauge engines. A 1.25 scaling factor seems a reasonable compromise. The wheel rims still touch the rails. Be sure to specify rescale in all directions, unless you like oval wheels or boilers.

Rescaling totally distorts the bounding box, headlight light positions, exhaust smoke and whistle plume positions. Trial and error with the eng file parameters will get them back in order. Don't forget to adjust the .SD file also for bounding box data. Trial & error was necessary because my copy of the BB utility did not like the eng file. Said it was not a valid eng file. But MSTS had no complaints. Go figure.

A note of caution, the shape file is quite large and SFM will take some minutes to uncompress, rescale and recompress the file.

Enjoy until a better Shay comes along.

Mike

[Sandy River Tom]

Mike:

There's a ghost from the past!!

Christian Schroder built Shay #3 about 3 - 4 years ago for his Sun Creek Valley Tramway Route,
which was loosely-based on the N.G. Monson Railroad. His partially-completed route was lost to
a Hard-Drive crash (Guys: remember to Backup - Backup - Backup!!!!)

I built a group of freight cars for his route, and have a couple of his unreleased models awaiting
a Route to run 'em on.

[charlie]

wellsburg, on Jan 3 2009, 09:01 PM, said:

A 1.25 scaling factor seems a reasonable compromise. The wheel rims still touch the rails.

Mike,

If the original was sized to fit UKNarrowGauge "2-foot" gauge, it never was at 24 inches but is 50% of the std gauge (oversized at 2 feet 4.25 inches). Eventually UKNG was absorbed into Xtracks.

Since Xtracks "3-foot" gauge never was at 36 inches but is 60% of the std (undersized at 2 feet 9.9 inches), the exact scaling factor might be 1.2.

From a route building standpoint, I'm glad they did it that way. When 100' and 50' std gauge pieces became 60' and 30' "3-foot" gauge pieces, it was infinitely better than trying to handle 63.716814159292035398230088495575 foot and 31.858407079646017699115044247788 foot exactly scaled pieces. :o

regards,
charlie

[engineerzach]

just thought i'd point out.. that website.. http://www.schmalspursim.de/ Schmalspur means Narrow gauge in german.. lol.. a narrow gauge railroad is a schmalspurbahn. lol.. thought i'd mention that lol

anywho. thats a nice shay, i'll have to give it a try