Railworks America

Howdy,

Today I start my first route for RW. The name Rocky Top Pass is inspired by the great song "Rocky Top Tennessee" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9prNixjbg). It will be a fictional freeware mountainroute set somewhere in the USA with a planned length of about 150 miles. The landscape will be sort like the Great Smoky Mountains. On the start there'll be doubletrack, but in high mountain areas and canyons it'll be singletrack.

Let's hope that I'll have enough stamina to finish it.

Post some screen shots along the way please.

Beautiful area of the US. Between this and the Mt Hood RR, thisngs are looking up for Railworks America fans

WIP: The starttown with a yard and a station located on the foot of the mountains.
By the way: Any suggestion and feedback is welcome.
http://img685.imageshack.us/i/screenshotrockytoppass0.png

Hi Micael.
For a first time route, you might find trying to make a 150 mile long route a bit too overwhelming and may soon will realize that it will take a looooong time and a lot of work to fill in all the various scenery and such to make it all look visually appealing, so you might consider making a smaller route for your first go at it.

For the first fully-working route I made (King's Arm Highway: http://www.rryard.com/kings_arm.html ), the overall route length I believe is roughly about 18 to 20 miles in length (taking into account some of the side paths), and that took me around 400 hours of time to complete. That's also including several scenarios I made to go along with it, which can take quite a bit of time in themselves to make.

For building a larger longer route (which I'm currently doing myself now: http://www.rryard.com/western_wildwood.html ), maybe try it in smaller chunks first, 15 or 20 miles in length to start with, fill in some details, and see how it shapes up from there. If after the first 15 or 20 miles completed, and if you want to keep expanding on it, then try to add on another 15 or 20 miles, and so on.

Once you make some good progress on and are feeling good about how things are shaping up, you should consider having a couple of people to help beta-test things and give you feedback in how to improve on things or point out some mistakes or errors you may have missed. Sometimes it can be hard to take criticism of one's work, but taken in a positive and constructive way it can be invaluable.

It's your route, and every route-builder has their own approach of how they like doing things, and if you are willing to put in the time and effort to make such a huge route (150 miles) then go for it. Being a fictional route, you can more let your imagination run wild and not be limited or restrained as much, so be creative and have fun with it. In route-building, sometimes one can "run out of steam" so to speak at times, so remember to take a break once in a while, then come back and attack it again refreshed.

For good ideas and inspiration, sometimes sit back, relax and drive some trains on some of the other routes. This can help clear the mind a bit too, is a little break from the route-building, and often times you'll see some things that you might consider trying similar on your own route.

Post up some screen-shots sometimes and let us know how progress is coming along.
Feel welcome to ask for advice in the forums, and I'm sure people will be glad to give input as they can.

Good luck!

WIP: The yard on foot of the Pass with maintenance facilities for the DPUs used on the route.
http://yfrog.com/2dscreenshotrockytoppass0p
http://yfrog.com/3vscreenshotrockytoppass0p
http://yfrog.com/4cscreenshotrockytoppass0p
http://yfrog.com/miscreenshotrockytoppass0p

Nice and clean looking. Good starting point in the yard.
Keep expanding on things, and in time and according to the area add in hills, mountains, trees, rivers, various foliage, buildings, roads, etc... to help make it all look like a living breathing world. Best wishes.

Progress is very, very slow. But I have a lot to at school at the moment.
After I played a while with Michael Stephans wonderful TOFC and Boxcars I thought of doing the route in a 1950s setting, but there are no Searchlight signals or accurate heritage crossings at the moment. So the route will come as originally planned in a modern setting.
I've only set speed limits and speedsigns in the last days.

You can now see how the forum software crops off the right side of the image if you link to it. It won't do that if you attach it to a post.
It will create a clickable thumbnail that, when clicked on, shows the full size image.

Of course you can right click on the image above and select 'View Image' and it will show full size.

Hawk wrote:You can now see how the forum software crops off the right side of the image if you link to it. It won't do that if you attach it to a post.
It will create a clickable thumbnail that, when clicked on, shows the full size image.

Of course you can right click on the image above and select 'View Image' and it will show full size.

Could you please tell me what to do to resize a picture on the pc?

micaelcorleone wrote:Could you please tell me what to do to resize a picture on the pc?

Usually depends on if you upload a pic to a host site then link to that site. I use Photo Bucket and I can choose what size the uploaded pic is. I just choose the screen size before I upload the pic. Then I just link to Photo Bucket. This also saves bandwidth and disk space on Railworks America's site. On my own tech support site, I do not allow any direct uploading at all. You have to link to a host site.

micaelcorleone wrote:Could you please tell me what to do to resize a picture on the pc?

To resize an image on your computer you need an image editing software, something like Irfanview, which is free.
It then depends on which software you use but it's generally an option found under the 'Edit' or 'Image' button in the toolbar.

I can't tell you how when using image hosting sites such as PhotoBucket or ImageShack.