New York Division-Bergen Line: Episode III, The Erie Rises

[bswitzrw]

I'm in need of a little closer perusal of your guide. Thanks for the quick and thorough explanation.

[minerman146]

Alright were back at it and this is the Wednesday Route Report and Update Status for this Friday, January 28th, 2022.

Update Status for this week...

[ ] Still 2 more branches to do
[ ] Waiting for DTG to approve EL
[ X ] But we be done!

I have a couple of small items to address. So, let's get to it. Schnauzahpowahz over on page 75, I had a thought. You, me, Busch Beer and an inteview. Can we drink live ? Waiting to hear from you buddy. Next up stats and a mea culpa!. First up stats:
Current Subscribers 3,679
Positive Ratings 304
Negative Ratings 4

Did you know that yesterday I had 5 negative ratings? Someone just withdrew thier downvote and explained themselves. I actually remember 3 out of the 5 downvotes as they posted their displeasure, and I presumed the subsequent negative rating was from them. This fellow I do remember as he was having a crap-ton of game lockup and CTD. He treated me like I worked for the 40 mile and coal tipple, mountain route people. Dude I am one guy and a 12 year old! Let's check out his post.

jmoonscope94 20 hours ago
So a few years ago after dealing with a lot of "out of memory" crashes on various routes, I downloaded a rather unfinished version of this and experienced the same crashes, which led me to kinda jump the gun and give this route some bad ratings and a crappy comment calling it a disgrace. I felt really bad for my harshness and decided to give the route another try now that it's finished and WOW is it incredible! The scenery is phenomenal and the QD templates are great for both passenger and freight! This is definitely a masterpiece!

I think he bailed on us way back in 2016. So, he comes back, totally owns what he says, and pulls his down vote. I am impressed. And by the way I never took his comment down. It is what is, someone wants to criticize, ya let em. All I can do is address the issue and try to help or fix. But Jmoonscope94, you're a good guy.

What got me writing again is interest - your interest in fact. Bswitzrw got me inspired with his knowledge based question on the Operations Guide. This is the kind of stuff that gets me daydreaming about the route when I drive, which I did today in fact, thinking about the guide and why I made it as an accessory to the route. I did not whip that together in the afternoon, the research on the businesses was insane to figure out what raw materials or freight the received. `There is one fake one I made as a gag about the route: I.Candy & Galore. No kidding - am I right? 2 other places are named for friends of the route. I have a hundred businesses on the route, and I say its ok to fake 3 of them for personal reasons. And for my Dad, I put the bar he used to hang out in after his shift cuz I am thoughtful like that.

Carry on.

[gtw5812]

Hello to All,

I am "Johnny come lately" to this route and all I can say is.....WOW! I am just starting to explore and I do have one question... I usually build a free roam scenario placing equipment and locomotives along the route, and then begin exploring. The question is, when I open the scenario builder, the only location it gives is "Route Origin"? No towns are listed. How may I pick a town to start in? Thanks everyone for the wonderful work...I actually recognize places that I have traveled through in this area!

Best Regards,

Galen

[kris120]

Unzip this and install with utilities:

Bergen-Routemarkers.zip

[gtw5812]

Unzip this and install with utilities:

Bergen-Routemarkers.zip

Thank you!

[minerman146]

It's been a month and this is the Wednesday Route Report and Update Status for this Friday, February 23th, 2022.

Miss me yet?

[ ] Doing the Scranton Division need 4 more years
[ ] Still Waiting for DTG to approve EL
[ X ] May be done but we aint out!

I'm back. I have stuff to post. So, background work has been underway to develop scenarios for the route by yours truly. We have been holding steady with only 13 scenarios since the Summer. Massive scenario counts were hoped for but not expected, so no disappointment. The issue may be the scope of the route. This isn't your hop on and bounce from station to station route, or your 40 miles and a coal tipple route, nor is it running a string of intermodals at 20 over a yet, another mountain route. This is the New York Division. So complex that other railroads sent their staff and trainmen to see how the EL did it.

Where I am going with this is back to the original concept of the route. Operations. I want to answer my own question of how they did it. I took "train simulator" literally not to mean a locomotive, but what I knew what a train: 4 GP35s and 110 cars, or GP7s and a jag of cars going to Carlstadt, motive power transfers, stalled trains, using road switchers to pull commuter trains. All that stuff.

So, my plan was to pack enough businesses onto the route to get a count of what traffic across the division looked like. Then I could pack my terminus yards, add the through trains and bridge traffic and voila were looking at the real deal. The Operations Guide is supposed to aid in this concept. The thing that took some time, just this past weekend, was to take the consignee list and put it on a spread sheet. So, now I have a baseline for traffic that I can manipulate. So, just to handle all my consignees (less Ford) If I staged just the fulls at maximum to cover 1 delivery I get 237 cars. Ford by itself, is 204 cars. This number does not cover the empty traffic or bridge, or intermodal. Most important, is by knowing the types and quantity of cars destined for my customers. I can build the trains. I even can order the cars for delivery. We can have some rudimentary classification going on. This weekend I tested 105 cars in Croxton, with 2 locos and a switcher, which I had building a train. Using my consignee data, I was able to assemble a 55 car train, in order, to drop at Suffern and Port Jervis. I'll just say, I have seen trains that looked like that. And my game didnt crash. So, I think I have a winner here.

I have messed around with scenarios before and I am up to the task. For the Operations guide, I will post the tables so other people can recreate the spread sheet. So, when are the scenarios coming? I can't say. I want to have all the prep work done and take the guess work out the consists. Then I can dig in and do it. But imagine, that you get to build and break down trains, run the division, do the locals, move the empties out while I add in every little incident I remember my Dad telling me or I have read about. Could be interesting.

Carry on.

[minerman146]

Welcome aboard Galen ! Nice shots of the Bergen in action!

[mindenjohn]

Could be interesting.

Wow, that's an understatement! Power to your elbow sir, and thank you for your endeavours.

[Chacal]

That's welcomed news.
Take your time, I retire in about 10 years.

[minerman146]

10 years? I'll make em worth the wait. Afterwards you will be qualified to run with the old man. Uh 50 years ago.

[Chacal]

I just published a repaint from IronCat60: GP9 NYGL .

[minerman146]

What do I say? To get you all up to speed today High Iron Simulations announced the release of some new DLC in the Penn Central Livery to be available "coming soon" to the steam workshop.
Linky: https://live.dovetailgames.com/live/tra ... n-railroad

I just got beat by the Penn Central.

You will have to read all the previous posts to get the gist of my views on the PC. Bottom line; the PC was the original "too big to fail" company and as history shows, the death of PC and the rise of Conrail was just a vehicle to keep the senior management of the Penn Central at work in the C-Suite. Of course at a cost. We can talk till the cows come home about the collapse of Brent-Woods, over population of railroads in the North East, Nixon, the gold standard and the over regulation of American railroads. All that tells you what the heck happened after 1973 through today.

Now I have tie this nonsense into the Bergen and why I built it. Bottom line: I saw the collapse of the railroads first hand, I watched an era change, business attitudes about long term holding versus quarterly returns. I lived this in my work career. The Bergen is a representation of a railroad that existed from 1840 to 1976 (in one form or another). Because of my interest in history, desire to understand this 'transition' and frankly to mourn the loss of a world that is no more, I built this route. Who I am as a person was defined by this era. My family's livelihood was impacted by this transition. The Bergen is a celebration of what was, of the past, a time populated by people, now long gone, of a special and unique railroad that was loved by its employees, a railroad that was scrappy until the bitter end. And so I found this, Train Simulator, as an outlet to express my interests and appreciation.

What I wanted was to share my knowledge and love for this railroad with all of you. I wanted the Bergen to feel "alive' as I remembered it. I wanted to show the majesty of the scenery, the industriousness of its people and show that this railroad had a purpose and a meaning. This railroad was special and its history is so strong in the Gilded Era I should be embarrassed. Because in spite of the speculation the people here, where i live, made their livelihood on this railroad and for whatever reason dedicated themselves to it and the railroad, became part of who they were. How else can I explain it. I didn't think words could do it. Though I could write a book. I thought that if I showed you, that it would be enough for you to, at least, appreciate it as I saw it. Shockingly, to several of you, you 'got it'.

And what I also wanted was recognition. Yes, I like recognition personally, but the recognition I wanted was for the railroad. It really is silly. I wanted DLC. I wanted Dovetail to sell gear with my railroads name on it. Like it was mainstream or something. So I made a route to show them how complex and interesting this railroad was. Surely they would see this. And one of them did. And I thought because he recognized it, that there was a chance. So, I kept building. As you all know it was 7 years of work. During that time I got teased that we would go 'mainstream' on train simulator. First, Travel By Train with it's GP35 Pennsy Pack, and during this time a boat load of DTG "Wednesday Workshop streams on Twitch, and finally where I went for broke on the GE U34CH.

On the U34CH I went all in. I figured that if I could finance a developer to build gear with my railroads name on it, I could get the 'in' I was looking for. Searchlight told me they dont do old stuff, I went to Virtual Rail Creation and he was in for the project. And bless you Jerry for giving me your last licks with this game. But alas, like me and really more than me he put way to much time in this game and had to get back to normal human schedule. Not sure what I was going to do, when VRC called it quits, on a friends recommendation, I went to DTM. I pitched that he could convert his existing Big 7 and turn it into not just a U34CH but a U33, which was not in game, and I would invest my own money in drawings, research and sound to make his model work. So he would sell it and I would get my railroad in game. Its all I wanted, my railroad as DLC, legitimacy and to prove that, if done right, you too could get your favorite railroad in game. Interestingly no one would take cash to do the project! They bought the pitch of sales and not me directly financing their work.

So, I devoted my time to research and acquiring the actual plans for the Pullman Coaches. I've told this story before, I had to pay people to go into the Pullman Library, pull physical blue prints, scan them and covert them to tiffs. $1475 that cost. I turned those plans over to DTM and he said he never ever had this level of drawings for a model. That was just the coaches. With the U34CH, we hit a brick wall, General Electric trashed all of their drawings and its impossible to find. So, with my research I knew the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey bought the last U34CH in existence from the New York and Greenwood Lake RR down there on the Dundee Spur. I got a hold of the VP of the URHS and told him to name his price to get cab interior images of the U34CH. $250 later I had 3 gigs of images that DTM did the interior off of. I did get the GE Operations manual for the U34CH and Pullman Cab Cars and I gave that to DTM. So the game plan was to do 3 models. The original U34CH and transitional "silver nose" with the NJT Logo and finally the Disco Version. We knew that the NJT version would not be a problem as we had NJT livery in game. DTM and I spend over 6 months working on this. I was adamant that all 3 versions get approved ( including my RR of course). The first problem came in when New Jersey Transit said that the Older Liveries didnt fit their corporate image, so we lost the NJ Dot logo. Then we were told initially, by DTG that my RR would not be problem based on their relationship with Norfolk Southern. At this point DTM asked me to let him just release the NJT so he could have some income as this project was cutting into doing other ones. I, of course, acquiesced and the NJT version, lacking some refinements was released. This was in April of 2020. We continued work on my RR version and got some help from my Dad, who drove it and Howard (CNWfan) who is brilliant and a great, wonderful guy who improved, enhanced and made really cool the scripting. I think this took another 3 months. And during this time no word from DTG and Norfolk Southern. Eventually we finished and DTM was asking DTG what was going on with approval. As of today it has been 25 months since the release of the NJT U34CH and still nothing about the version I wanted to do.

And so by some freak coincidence today, Tuesday, May 17th 2022, I decide to write to Lord Mannu at DTM about that status of our EL NJDOT. Ive written to him every month on the dot for the past 18 months asking him to get an update from DTG on the model. In the past, it was "they haven't heard back from Norfolk Southern", "nothing yet" and then it was just silence. They are not responding. I was hoping a some point I could say something here as a status update. Today I told him to try one more time, and if no then just release it on his own and skip my whole "get my railroad in game" thing.

Sure I havent posted in almost 2 months - but I am a lurker. I check RWA, Dovetail, Steam and the internet for any mention of the Bergen. And today I find that High Iron is releasing Penn - Huck Tooey - Central DLC! ( Imagine here a long rant where I enumerate all the crimes of the Penn Central revealing my personal distaste of that railroad ) So, imagine my shock that DLC that may be under Norfolk Southern control gets into this game and Im left hanging.

Bottom line - I took the risks, I knew this was a long shot and I've come up short. I am absolutely devastated over this. As far as DTG is concerned and the way they have drawn this out for over 2 years, I am recommending torches and pitch forks, in spite of the fact that I think that is a half measure.

Unfortunately, yet again, I want to go nuclear but manage to contain myself. But I want all of you to read what I said in another thread and read how I was spoken to, like I was just another griefer... that stung.

So I can cover my butt here, I am laying my guts out because this is personally important to me. I have perspective and I realize this is a bit over the top. I put a lot of time in to try to make something happen, its not the end of the world for me, I can move on. But wow, I sure put a shiite ton of time and effort in for the old Erie Lackawanna didn't I?

I appreciate all of your support, friendship and your dedication to what we do here. Thank you for your time.

Carry on.

[mindenjohn]

Respect.

[ElphabaWS]

I understand the frustration, but this whole issue (as it relates to the PC Pack announcement) is based upon a basic misunderstanding of the situation. While from a historical standpoint you choose to connect PC and EL, the reality is ....

- The brand license holder of PC (and NYC, PRR, and New Haven) graciously granted a brand license and the upcoming pack in fact includes PC, NYC, PRR, and NYNH&H content.

- The above mentioned license holder does not control the license for EL.

- The above license holder is not NS (or CSX).

In reality, there is no relevance or connection to the issue of this PC license and what may be the issue(s) with or status of an EL license.

[minerman146]

I understand the frustration, but this whole issue (as it relates to the PC Pack announcement) is based upon a basic misunderstanding of the situation. While from a historical standpoint you choose to connect PC and EL, the reality is ....
- The brand license holder of PC (and NYC, PRR, and New Haven) graciously granted a brand license and the upcoming pack in fact includes PC, NYC, PRR, and NYNH&H content.
- The above mentioned license holder does not control the license for EL.
- The above license holder is not NS (or CSX).
In reality, there is no relevance or connection to the issue of this PC license and what may be the issue(s) with or status of an EL license.

I really appreciate you coming on and giving me some valuable information. DTM and I are completely in the dark as to who owns what. I thought its was NS as Norfolk and Western owned the EL for a few years as Dereco and donated all their holdings to the U of VA when they cut bait after Agnes in '72. If it is humanly possible, can you provide any insight to who or what owns the EL ( Erie and DL&W).

As of this morning DTM is in contact with "S" over at DTG, they responded and are looking into our situation. S states there was some internal confusion over our original pack. DTM is going to reach out to you as well today for some assistance/insight. I don't know if this will remedy the EL problem.

Believe me I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but everything is so opaque and this has been going on for years now. I'm crestfallen at this point, and I know it shows. I think you want me to acknowledge that what you have is implicit permissions from a party that is not NS and so is not related to the EL. I think that your assertion is probable and likely based on what you have posted here. Other than a bit of envy - I have no hard feelings towards you. I hoped you would be an advocate for my plight. Perhaps you have been all this time and I didnt know.

Thank you so much for efforts and time with this.