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Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 8:38 am Posts: 160 Location: Sunny Brisbane
As a continuation of my original comments about the Blue Mountains - Steam Era V2.0, the route has now expanded so far that a new name is required - from here on it will be known as the 'Short West + Short South'.
At this point in time the original Blue Mountains - Steam Era V1.0 has still not yet been released, even though it 'went to the publishers' over two months ago - I have no idea when it will be released. So, in the meantime I'm pressing on with the follow-up route.
The new route 'Short West + Short South' pretty much covers it - this route is the culmination of FOUR route authors coming together - it started with Mike Simpson giving me permission to revise his excellent 'Blue Mountains' route to the 1955-1960 Steam-Electric changeover era. Once I had performed the upgrade, I started to expand west to Wallerawang and east to St Marys, but the route building big hit me hard.
I pressed on east from St Marys to Lidcombe, but from there it went a bit wilder than I originally thought.
In my negotiations with Chris Nelson in finalizing the Southern Highlands route to be released as a stand-alone route (see today's announcements) he agree for me to merge it into my 'super' route, so the full section from Maldon to Moss Vale has been grafted onto my route, and I have completed the base trackwork from Maldon through Campbelltown, Liverpool to link up with my work from St Marys to Lidcombe.
Then to top it all off Peter Newell gave me permission to graft the Sydney end tiles from CTN onto the eastern end of the route.
Hence, the 'Short West + Short South' route now covers the Short West line from Sydney Terminal right through to Wallerawang AND the Short South line from Sydney Terminal right through to Moss Vale.
Other areas covered, include the Richmond Branch from Blacktown through Windsor to Richmond, and the Sandown Industrial complex including the Shell Refinery, as well as a number of short stub lines.
The full extent of this route is shown in the screenshot below. However, bear in mind that all the 'linking' between the other three routes is just track on bare terrain for the moment.
I'm anticipating completion and release to be somewhere around late October, early November.
Joined: Thu Jun 05, 2008 10:10 am Posts: 90 Location: somewhere lost in the Sth. Highlands in N.S.W.
Brian, that is great news looks like we can drive around most of the Sydney Rail network and outer areas. I hope Moss Vale station will have their Dining room open as starting from Central I sure will be hungry by the time I get there love those Railway Pies.
Cheers,
Robert.
Great news now we've got all four mainlines out of Sydney. Keep up the excellent work Brian, Chris and Russell. Also was the Kurrajong line open at the time of the route?
I'm just going to have to wait until my computer's working again.
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 8:38 am Posts: 160 Location: Sunny Brisbane
GeoffreyHansen wrote:
........... Also was the Kurrajong line open at the time of the route?................
Unfortunately, not - the Kurrajong line closed in 1952 - after a period of prolonged storms and heavy rain, the Kurrajong end of the line was subjected to washaways and landslips - the NSWGR decided that the effort to repair it was not justified, considering the low level of traffic (both passenger and goods) and made the decision to close the line permanently.
In recent years the preservation group TRAK aims to restore the line and get a working railway again - see http://www.trak.org.au/
There was also a platform at Marrangaroo just before the line branched off into the Army Camp.
It was there up to at least the early 70s as I use to pass it quite regularly on W63, the Mudgee Mail. Those were the days after I had moved to Sydney after completing my apprenticeship at Kandos.
Anyway 27 years ago I saw the light and moved back to Lithgow and have been here ever since.
If you want someone to have a look at your route I will put my hand up as I have travelled the Blue Mountains trains quite a bit.
Cheers Pat
I posted this on the General Routes forum but it now seems redundant the offer I made.
Joined: Mon May 19, 2008 8:38 am Posts: 160 Location: Sunny Brisbane
ANNOUNCEMENT : the 'Short West + Short South' route no longer exists.
I have some BAD NEWS - but first, I want to explain my Backup philosophy.
About six years back I had a substantial system failure, and lost a LOT of important data in the system crash. This resulted in me having to buy a new PC, and so I had a re-think about my backup stategies - the new PC had a 250GB main HDD 'C', and I added a removable HDD cradle which could then accommodate my next oldest HDD, a 40GB drive. Obviously a 40GB drive would not be able to backup the entire 250GB drive, so I adapted the policy of only backing up data files on the 40GB drive, as Windows and all the application software could easily be re-installed in the event of a disaster. To further re-inforce this strategy, I added a second removeable cradle, containing an older 30GB drive to make a second copy of the most important files.
A week or so ago, we had a few days of very hot unseasonal Winter weather in Brisbane, several days in the low 30's. On the Saturday, late in the afternoon, at around 33 degrees in my office, I was working away when I noticed a 'hot dusty electronic' smell, and thought 'something's not right!!!' - as I started to investigate it, without any warning there was a 'fffsssttttttttt' sound, and the PC DIED, and the 'hot dusty electronic' smell got really strong!!! It would not bootup, in fact nothing worked, so I now had another 'dead' PC. The irony of this is that I had the 40GB backup drive installed in the cradle, as I needed to recover some non-MSTS document files, and I was intending to do a full backup of everything (data that is) on both the 40GB and 30GB drives on the Sunday - but that didn't happen, because the PC died on the Saturday. I have since bought a new PC (more about that later).
I have now had the time to fully investigate what happened. Unfortunately, where I live is on the top of a small plateau, and a few kilometres to the west is a fairly substantial light industrial/commercial area, and the prevailing west winds bring a far higher concentration of airborne dust in the atmosphere, which of course seems to permeate its way into all parts of the house, and as a result gets sucked into my PC by the fans. Unknown to me at the time, my existing PC had a rather poorly designed power supply unit. This PC had worked it's little a-r-s-e off - basically running 10 hours a day, seven days a week for the last six years, a fair old workload, and unknown to me the dust buildup inside the power supply inside was extreme. What happened was the combination of the hot day, with an extreme buildup of dust inside, the power supply decided it had enough and it 'fried' itself - unfortunately whatever it was that failed, seems to have created a voltage spike that zapped down all the internal power cables in the system - this unfortunately 'fried' the electronics on ALL the drives in the system, the main HDD 'C', the backup drive 'D' (which was in the cradle at the time) and my DVD and floppy drives - I've tried them in an old PC, but none of them will even spin, so either the motors are zapped or the electronics controlling the motors. I also found that all the heatsinks were pretty much clogged with dust as well. I also suspect that damage was also done to the motherboard and the video card - in short this PC is a TOTAL WRITEOFF. What an incredible chain of events - normally the 40GB backup drive would NOT be installed and my data would have been safe, but not this time!!! You live and learn!!. I have been able to install the older 30GB drive and get back a fair amount of data, but everything I've done in the last six weeks is GONE forever.
I spent some time examining details of what my new PC would be, and in choosing, I've selected one which has VERY good cooling and airflow characteristics and have gone for 'premium' parts to ensure that a similar incident does not manifest itself in the future (well as far as I can) - I also intend to open the case and blow (with a pressure can of dust repelant) and vacumm the interior at roughly one year intervals.
Now I have another new backup stategy - my new PC has a 500GB main HDD 'C', added to this is a totally separate external 500GB drive through a USB2 connection - the external drive does not depend on power from the PC, so the only connection to the new PC is via the data cable. I intend to leave the New PC running for extended periods, and have setup the backup to automatically do a full backup of the 500GB 'C' drive every day. I think this is about the most reliable method of ensuring my data is protected.
The new PC - it is an AMD Phenom quad-core, 4GB of DDR RAM, a 500GB SATA drive (7200rpm with 12 MB cache), a 1GB nVidea 9500 GT video card, 500w 'professional' power supply, Intel certified 'ducted airflow' case and 120mm fans everywhere!!! As I dealt direct with the assembler (who is not a retail store, but only sells to dealers/consultants, like myself) I was able to have a very close look at all his cases and power supplies to get the best ones.
I'm VERY impressed - for the first time ever I can have MSTS fully 'maxed' out with all settings on high, and I get about double the frame rates, and substantially less stuttering - MSTS is now quite smooth and pleasant to run!!!
Now to the BAD news - what have I lost???
I have lost ALL my TSM masters that I've built over the last six weeks, and that amounts to over 90 new or upgraded models (including the masters for the 25 new NSW PO tank wagons that were recently released on AMW), including about ten or so very special custom 'signature' buildings that I made for several routes. I've also lost a few new routes that I had recently downloaded and installed, and some new rolling stock that I had downloaded and installed, but this is not such a problem, as I can download them all over again.
BUT, the BIG DISASTER was that I've lost the entire new 'Short West + Short South' route that I was working on - I had six progressive backups of the route, but they were all on the removeable 40GB second drive that got 'fried' in the meltdown. To say I was absolutely gutted would be an understatement!!!
I've done a preliminary survey as to whether I might attempt to rebuild the route, but as well as the route being lost, and the custom TSM buildings being lost, and also having lost a 'library' of prototype photos and info pertaining to this route, my heart is just not in it anymore. So, there will NOT be another version of this route that linked the work of Peter Newell, Chris Nelson and Mike Simpson togeher with my interconecting work. The route was about 2/3 finished and represented about eight months work, so to get the route out again would be around twelve months work in total - I'll just simply move on to other projects.
I had also started some preliminary upgrade work on three other existing routes, and this was lost as well.
So, I'm still downloading and installing what I can recover, then I'll do a thorough examination of exactly what I've lost, and whether I'll attempt to rebuild some of it in TSM and/or RE again, or move on to other MSTS projects. One thing, it just makes me more determined to finish off my long MSTS 'To Do' list. MSTS is still very much alive and well in my world, at least!!!
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