Railworks America

I'm curious to know becasue I never tried STRM. Redem is good, but is STRM better and more accurate?

SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) represents 30 and 90 meter DEM, while ReDem can handle up 1/9 arc-second, which is approximately 3 meter, with 1/3 arc second (10 meter) most common here in the states. The highest Railworks can display is 8 meter, so you could use 1/3 or 1/9 arc second DEM (the latter if available) from the USGS Seamless Server. ReDem is also more efficient, as you can specify the exact area you wish to do all in one sitting, without having to surf your route pressing the 'T' key, and hoping you don't run out of DEM or hit a seam, at which point Railworks has a nasty habit of crashing (30 meter only).

In short:

• Railworks Editor - you got that one now
• SRTM: Free, 90 meters global, 30 meter for North America and a few other countries (a bit of a pain to find the right coordinates needed, however)
• ReDem - Faster and more efficient (you get a lot of program for peanuts)
• USGS Seamless (BIL format, as used in RW): Free, 3 (a few US states), 10 (US and parts of Canada), 30 (US and Canada), and 90 meter (everywhere else), and much more accurate (no seams!)

It's been a while, and my memory fades, but I once did a comparison of bil data with srtm (hgt?) data, for my route. I used both redem and the 'T' method for getting terrain in Railworks. I hope it is allowed to link to another forum, where I did the comparison.

http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showthread ... s-hgt-data

Okay so I've used SRTM for all of my routes so far, but how do I go about using BIL data?

Trainguy76 wrote:Okay so I've used SRTM for all of my routes so far, but how do I go about using BIL data?

ReDem uses BIL data. I use the program and it's easy to set up the route terrain with it.
The BIL data can be downloaded from the official seamless servers of the USGS.

gwgardner wrote:I hope it is allowed to link to another forum, where I did the comparison.

Allowed? Appreciated is more the word in this instance

One interesting thing I found, after using both bil and hgt data, was that there were a couple of tiles for some reason that I couldn't get to show up with bil data, and I was able to fill in with 'T' using hgt/SRTM.