I was thinking would it be possable to either rebuild the track into the Melbourne To Seymore from Footscary To Ballarat? Or can they be merged together? If they can be merged could Russell please put them as a all in one route?

Regards Phil

I gave it a go when I started building the seymour track and it worked with some minor moving of the tiles in Routeriter I got them to match up to within 500 meters and the track alignment was pretty good after adjusting the curvature east of footscray.
After I completed the route I gave it another try and had failure after failure, Tiles missing track floating above empty space ect.
I gave up very disheartened!
If someone can pull this one off I would be very happy and I would release it.
Just getting the tiles and track with a gap separating the two routes would be good as I can redo or build the connecting bits.

Hey Russ, I could see if I can have a go at merging your routes together mate. I tried it last night but I think I did something wrong. I firstly confirmed route in routeriter and click merge but nothing happend could you PM me or post it on how to merge your routes???

Regards Phil

Same problem here.
Dont know why?
Its not really my area of expertise!

I got an idea since you and I have the same problem to merge both routes together I will write down all the tracks that you used in your Melbourne to Seymore route and rebuild them into your Footscary to Ballarat route. Would this be alright Russ? If I happen to bugger it I will let you know by email and if everything turns out

No problems go ahead!

Hey Russell, I am sorry to be rude but I now know why your routes failed to merge, it's based on the same problem of Coals To Newcastle & Northern Illawarra routes and I finally realise what Brian was explainning to me.

Ok you and I have tried to merge both of your routes together but nothing happened so today I have thought of another way I then copied and paste the following files from Melbourne To Seymore to Footscary To Ballarat

PATHS, SHAPES, TEXTURES, SOUND, TERRTEX, TILES & WORLD folders

I then wen't into route editor and found an error, you can see it in the following picture as it is abit hard to explain



All the track for Footscary To Ballarat have somehow been put underground and the track above ground is the Melbourne To Seymore route

Error_2 is a view of the activity editor of the map



Regards Phil

P.S. I think that I leave your routes the way they are rather then building it all over again

Brian's reaction will be something to await should you actually merge NI and CTN together

ARG - I think if you read Phil's comment properly, he is saying that he now understands why CTN and Northern Illawarra CANNOT be merged.

When I originally merged the 4 Sydney end tiles from CTN onto Northern Illawarra, I had no intention of adding the Metropolitan Goods Lines (MGL), so I did not use any CTN tiles any further west than Newtown. Even then, I had to 'stretch' the east-west connections between Sydenham and St.Peters by half a kilometre to be able to link up with Peter's Illawarra 'stub lines' at Erskineville. This merge was successful, although it resulted in a 'fictional half kilometre joiner'. After the merge, I had to put all the interactives back in those 4 CTN tiles - this is relatively easy to do for only 4 tiles, but would be a massive job for a much larger route.

In hindsight, it would have been better for me to have originally used more of the western end of CTN, and I could have carefully adjusted the Metro Goods Lines to fit to Peter's original CTN lines. However, CTN and NI are out by an east-west factor of around half a kilometre. So where my MGL crosses under the main west in a north-south direction (near Mungo Scotts) is out by half a kilometre from where CTN puts the same north-south MGL crossing.

As the co-author of CTN and the sole author of NI, I can tell you in no uncertain terms that merging of the two routes, in their present configuration, is just NOT possible.

It could be done, but I would have to rip out all my Metro Goods Lines, merge CTN to NI all over again, then laboriously put back all the Metro Goods lines, but adjusted to 'connect' to the CTN track database taking the half kilometre east-west deviation into account.

But the major problem now is when you merge two routes, one of those routes loses ALL of its interactives.

If I merge CTN to Illawarra, I would loose all the CTN interactives (signals, etc.) and have to put them all back in over the whole of Peter's route.

If I merge Illawarra to CTN, I would loose all the Illawarra interactives and have to put them all back in my over the whole of my route.

Either way, it represents a MASSIVE amount of rebuilding work - at this late stage of MSTS1's life, it is just not worth the effort!!!!

One final note on merging routes - keep your eyes open for when Main Illawarra V3 is released, as there is now a THIRD route merged onto the bottom of that!!!

Regards, Brian

If Google Earth was used to create the marker file for both the CTN and the Northern Illawarra routes would not the stations and the tracks be in the same geographical location on both routes thus making it easier to merge the two routes? How can the same track have two different geographical locations on two seperate routes if the same application for the marker file is used?
Heavy Harry

Gidday Heavy Harry,

There has been a fair amount of discussion about merging routes over several forums over the past year or so.

The basic answer to your question was posted on RailPage around a month ago - for your benefit (and for anyone else who may be inclined to ask), I'm appending a direct quote from that post:

<<< The Sydney end of CTN from Enfield / (Lidcombe) through Strathfield to Central / Darling Harbour is NOT compatible with the Sydney end of Northern Illawarra V2.

In NI, the Sydney end is only the last 4 tiles copied from CTN (with Peter's permission), joined at Erskineville. However, the track and marker file placement on the CTN and NI tiles is out by around half a kilometre, in an east-west direction.

In NI, there is an 'artificial' lengthening of the lines between Sydenham and St. Peters, and Leichhardt and Rozelle, to get the two routes to join. As NIv2 also includes the 'bottom' half of Enfield and the lines through Canterbury and Wardell Rd Junctions, to Rozelle and on to Darling Harbour, the CTN tracks will NOT be in the right positions at Enfield yards, or where the Main West crosses over the 'goods lines' near Mungo Scott's.

This half a kilometre 'displacement' is a direct result of MSTS 'track creep' caused by two different routes stating so far apart - in CTN the track starting point was Newcastle station, and in NI, the track starting point was Thirroul. As each separate route expanded out from these starting points, towards Sydney, the 'track creep' ensured that the two routes would NOT line up in Sydney - that is why, when the 4 CTN tiles were added to NI, the 'join point' was half a kilometre out. There was no way that the CTN tiles could have been added to the 'top of NI' at the correct connection point.

This is simply a fact of the 'world inaccuracies' of MSTS. In hindsight, if both Peter and I had started at the Sydney platforms as the starting points of both routes, it would have come together much better. However, remember that Peter started his route over 4 years ago now, and the first NI V1 was started about 1 1/2 years ago. >>>

It is a well known fact in the world of MSTS that the way MS/Kuju setup the 'tile' system, that for long routes, there is a degree of 'track creep' (also known as 'slew') - the further away from the starting point, the greater the error from 'real world' co-ordinates.

As mentioned in that quote, Peter started his route from Newcastle - by the time he laid all the track (to the correct track and curve diagrams) the actual Sydney end of the route at Central buffer stops was displaced on the MSTS world tiles by a significant distance because of the MSTS 'track creep'.

Similarly, my route started at Thirroul, and by the time it reached Sydenham (which was the end of my original marker file generated from Google Earth - at that point in time I had only intended to make NI from Wollongong to Meeks Road Junctions / Sydenham / Marrickville), it also suffered considerable 'tile displacement'.

It was only once I reached that point that I suddenly got the urge to take it all the way into Central (and to Enfield, Rozelle and Botany over the Metropolitan Goods Lines). To do this I got permission from Peter to 'highjack' the last 4 tiles from CTN - once they were merged with NI, I found the 'track creep' error to be about half a kilometer, mostly in an east-west direction. The additional sections to NI, from Meeks Road to Enfield and Botany were done from additional markers generated from Google Earth, but the section from the end of my track at Sydenham to join up with Peter's at Erskineville had to be 'fudged' to accommodate the extra half kilometre of track.

Just for your info, all the tiles in NI were DEM'ed. The discovery of the 'Illawarra area' DEM data in the first place was my reason for starting the route - I had considered making the route some years back (because it was my 'home' route), but the thought of having to manually try to build the Illawarra Escarpment to any degree of realism stopped me making it - but once I found the DEM, the routes tiles were extracted and DEM'ed within 24 hours!!!

Now to consider CTN - I'm not sure what Peter used to make his marker files, as when he first started the route, some 4 years ago or so, Goggle Earth was not available. Also all terrain in CTN has been manually drawn from contour maps by Peter - DEM was not used.

As I said before, in hindsight, if both Peter and I had started our separate routes at Central buffer stops on the same MSTS tile, both routes would merge without drama!!! But, it was not to be - I have explained elsewhere why these two routes will never be fully merged.

I hope this clears up, once and for all, the fact that CTN, as it currently stands, and NI, as it currently stands, CANNOT be fully merged.

Regards, Brian

Just to add to Brian’s post and maybe shed some more light on the matter, the bane of many route builders is the issue of ‘track creep’ that Brian refers to.

MSTS uses a flat earth projection for its terrain while google Earth and SRTM DEM and other real world data sets use different map projections (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection for more information). This means that when you use google Earth to generate lat/longs they get distorted in the MSTS world.

Think of MSTS route terrain as a square sheet of graph paper. If you try and wrap that sheet of paper flat over a sphere (that represents the earths surface) the centre of the paper will be smooth over the sphere but the further towards the edges you get, the paper will have to fold and crease to flatten against the sphere. Now plot the route from the sphere (google Earth) onto the paper (MSTS world) and then remove paper from sphere and iron it out flat again so that the graph paper grids are square again.

The above is a crude example but hopefully demonstrates how track creep occurs when you use real world co-ordinates in the MSTS world. Route builders have to take this into account and it’s compounded when you have to squeeze a curve and gradient diagram between the two. A route builder then has to either find the curve of best fit between the different data sets they have for reference or they stick religiously to one projection system or the other.

I suspect the curve of best fit is the most common method of route building. It is therefore understandable that after starting approximately 200km apart and building towards Central, that two different route builders using different data would not necessarily meet at exactly the same point. That being said each has built an accurate route in it’s own right, and it is a testament to their route building skills that they came within 500m of each other.

Thanks for that additional clarification, Superheatedsteam.

I was originally intending to add something to try and explain 'track creep' in layman's terms, but I couldn't come up with an adequate description.

Your description more than makes up for that!!!

Let's just hope that when MS finally gets MSTS2 out into the public arena, that the problem of 'track creep' has been eliminated - by the basic descriptions so far released about their 'World of Rails', it sounds like they just might have actually achieved that!!!

Oh, BTW, Northern Illawarra was done using the 'curve of best fit' methodology!!!

Regards, Brian

I personally don't think that there is much to be gained from having 'mega routes'. The variations required to build them, the geographic variation creep, the complexity of trackwork and the scenery tile limit mean anything huge is gonna run like a pig.

Especially where there is a city involved, having multiple lines out of town means that there will be alot more scenery crammed onto a tile than one single departure with junctions going nowhere.

I don't see that the advantage of a large route outweighs the disadvantages.

Actually, it gets even better than that!!!

As most of you are aware, I've already announced that Main Illawarra V3 has been finished, and is in the hands of the 'publishers'.

But, what I haven't announced is exactly how far V3 is going!!!! Previous announcements have indicated 'the end' at Minnamurra (where Paul Woozley's original Illawarra Stage 1 route left off). My new section, Wollongong to Minnamurra ,was built from a Google Earth generated maker file.

However, I can (probably) now announce that the forthcoming MI v3 will go right to the end of the line at Bomaderry (Nowra) - I have managed to successfully merge Paul's original route (but now backdated to the 1950's to match the rest of my route - but still leaving the essence of Paul's original quality work in place) onto the end of Main Illawarra.

The thing that astounded me (I built to Minnamurra first, then merged Paul's route) was the end of my track and the end of Paul's track was only 100 metres apart - I just could not believe it!!! A slight 'slewing' of the last few hundred metres of my route, and the last few hundred metres of Paul's route, and including 'filling the gap', results in a merge that is nearly impossible to see the join!!!! I think that is also a testimony to Paul's excellent route building skills!!!

So, the forthcoming Main Illawarra V3 route is (I believe) the first successful merge of THREE Australian routes - part of Peter's CTN at the top, all of Paul's Illawarra-stg1 at the bottom, and all my work in between from Erskineville to Minnamurra. I don't know if anyone else in the MSTS world has successfully merged three routes.

From another point of view, V3 represents, for the first time, that an entire NSWGR line will be completed in MSTS, Sydney to Nowra, and as the whole line is only 95 miles long, it does not have a significant impact on performance, like so-called 'mega-routes' - MIv3 runs quite respectably on my 4-year old 'average' PC (P4-3ghz, 1GB RAM, 128MB video card, 250 GB HDD, 1280x1024 on a 19" monitor).

Regards, Brian

Thank you Brian and Superheatedsteam for the explanations as to the problems that arise when you try to merge (join) two or more routes together. As I am very new to MSTS and I am still trying to get my head around things with the route building. I was hoping to have picked up a few things with the Route Building Tutorial. I have however noticed in my exploring of the files of various routes that some of the route builders use marker files and some do not. If you do not use Google Earth for marker files then how do you plan out the route? I was interested in the merging of CTN, SydWest and the Blue Mountains Routes so that trains like "The Fish", "The Chips" and the "Caves Express" could run from Central to Lithgow. What would your suggestion be as to how to either merge these routes or build a new route from scratch and what method would be the best to use for the planning (marker file or other)?
Thanks
Heavy Harry

Or it could be that they have not included the marker files with the route. You don't have to use marker files but it can help.



Extensively. One of the route builders mottos is ‘plan twice. lay track once’. Good advise that I ignored and it is a constant reminder each time I pass over the first curve I built in my route.

If you’re building a modern real world route then google Earth and DEM data are readily available nowadays. Coupled with a Curve and Gradient diagram if you can get it is enough to get you laying track.

If building a historic route then you will require even more reference material to see how if differed from current alignment. Get as much reference material as possible. Read the MSTS route building forums (here and overseas as well) to see what other route builders have done to build their routes. Before I started laying a track on my route I read, read, read and then I read some more.

I would also recommend getting Mike Vone’s guide to route building as it is a valuable reference all contained in one location.

I found building a small test route before embarking on the big one helped. Nothing fancy just leaning how to extract tiles in RGE and how to lay track, gradients, turn outs, modify terrain, place 3d objects etc. I played around with it just to get my hand in and get a better idea if I was going to be able to continue on something bigger. A couple of weeks well spent.



I think that Brian has already covered the problems of merging routes in his previous posts. To be blunt I suspect your chances of successfully merging three existing routes with your current level of experience with route building are extremely slim. I have been building my route for a couple of years now and I would not attempt such a task.

Extending an existing route (like the Blue Mountains for your desired route) would be a more realistic option. You will most likely have to add tiles using the RGE (Route Geometry Extractor) and start laying track from Penrith to wherever you are going. If this ‘extended route’ is for your own use then what you do in the privacy of your own home is your business. If you wish to redistribute your work then you must get permission from the original route builder.

If you want to start a new route then search the MSTS route building forums for ideas and get Michael Vone’s book. You wont regret it.

Hope this helps.

Marek.

Has anyone got a street map of Melbourne please? As this would help me to rebuild both of Russell's routes into one

Regards Phil

P.S. This map must at least cover from Seymore to Melbourne & Melbourne to Ballarat and please don't forget the main line to and from Sydney

Thank you very much for your help and advise Marek, I will acquire a copy of Michael Vone's book and play around building a small route to obtain the experience.
Heavy Harry

Phil,
I don't think that a Melbourne street map will help you as it is only a map of Melbourne metro area. I would suggest that you go to the NRMA and see what maps they have that could help you

Have a little patience, grasshopper!!!

I'm also very interested in running those trains too!!!

I've already made up FreightAnim 'add-ons' for The Fish, The Chips and The Heron nameboards to go with Chris Jennings U-boats, as well as the appropriate Consists - these will be released with the 'Blue Mountains - Steam Era' route - the Caves Express is already included in a NSWGR Steam Era Passenger Trains Support Pack available on the CTN website - http://coalstonewcastle.railpage.org.au/msts/

I've already announced elsewhere that I am currently re-building Mike Simpson's 'Blue Mountains' route (with his permission of course), back to the 1955-1960 era - I've set it up so that a 'batch file' removes all the electrification west of Emu Plains for the 1955 to 1957 era, and another batch file puts it all back for the 1958 to 1960 era.

Also the route has been extended - in the west: from Lithgow through Cooerwul, Bowenfels (end of electrification), Marangaroo to Wallerawang, with 1km 'stub' line to 'The west' and 'The north-west' - in the east from Penrith through Kingswood, Werrington to St.Marys, including the Ropes Creek branch. This will be called 'Blue Mountains - Steam Era V1'.

Once I've got that done and 'in the public arena', I have plans to extend it further east as Version 2 - from St.Marys, through Blacktown, Parramatta, Granville, to Lidcombe (where CTN currently leaves off) - also to be included with this section is part of the Suburban line diverging off at Granville to Liverpool .and including the Main South from Lidcombe through Sefton to Cabramatta, and on to Liverpool.

In fact I already have added the Tiles, DEM, marker file and 'placeholder' platforms for this V2 extension as part of V1.

With reference to the 'SydWest' route - I had a good look this route, but considered it be outside the scope of what I'm doing (1955-1960 era - when SydWest is the 'modern' day track, etc. - so far out of era that it is not worth merging with BM-SE-V2). I'm including Blacktown, as it was around 1958, with only a 'stub' line for the Richmond branch, but including the electric car sidings and the 'Down flyover'.

Then, maybe at some time, if I get permission from Peter, there may be a V3 with the section of CTN from Lidcombe / Flemington to Central added onto the eastern end of BM-SE-V2.

So, there is some interesting stuff coming up re the Main West over the Blue Mountains.

Regards, Brian

Hi Brian, Fantastic to read your post about the Blue Mountains Route. We non Route Builders enjoy all the Aussie Routes available for us to download. The BM ROUTE I,m sure will be Tops from the BBS workshops.Regards,
Robert.

I only need the Melbourne map so I can work out the rail areas between Footscary & Spencer Street Stations because it's hard to work it out with Google Maps and Google Earth, and if I am going to do markers I might as well try building my own route all over again and in this case I can't be bothered as MSTS 2 is on it's way

Regards Phil

Phil,

I suspect you may need corrective eye ware. I have never been to Melbourne yet I just zoomed into Melbourne with google Earth. Searched and found Footscary and Spencer Street, zoomed in further and can see crystal clear images of individual tracks between these two areas to six decimal places for lats and longs.



Does this mean you’re giving up on MSTS route building and waiting for MSTS2?

The track diagrams are available on Mark Bau's VR web site.
Get the routes merged first then we will talk about joining them up with track!