Dunsmuir to Mt. Shasta and Weed

[osonegro]

I'm working on a route from the yards south of Dunsmuir, Ca to the city of Mt. Shasta and the town of Weed in Northern Ca. Is anyone doing anything in this area as I don't want to duplicate work. I have the mainline track laid for the Dunsmuir yard to just south of Mt. Shasta. I got the elevation data for the NGSA site and it looks real nice. I've always wanted to do this section of the SP route as I have been in the area.

[Haystack]

This is a nice scenic area to do a route for. Can't wait to see some pictures

[imnew]

Another route we can run SP equipment on, perfect

[ricksan]

Björn "Nalle" Centergran is the author and principal builder of the MSTS Feather River route and he's a serious fan of the Western Pacific. Nalle started the route you're referring to in the early days of RailWorks. He abandoned the project because the stingy draw distance at the time precluded any views of Mount Shasta, even though the terrain for it had been formed. Now the draw distance is slightly more generous, but before you get too far you might want to make sure the mountain is indeed visible from the tracks as it's easily the most iconic scenery feature in the region. A quick look at Google Earth suggests you might have a shot at it. Good luck!

[MadMike1024]

For a period of time, I drove truck up and down through that area. I traveled I-5 and Highway 97 both. Beautiful country, would make a wonderful scenic route.

With the increase in draw distance as Rick suggested, I'm going to revisit the Hood River route and see if I can get Mt. Hood to show.
New tools and additional assets may make it possible to finish it.

[GSkid]

Weed!?!? Did someone (cough cough cough) say weed?

Never been there. Furthest north in California I've been is Yuba city. Checked it out in streetview and it certainly looks pretty.

As for draw distance. You know, I never paid attention to it closely in 2012 .....which is when I jumped in. I was using MSTS before that. I had 2012 installed on my old laptop with a 2.16GHz Celeron M 585 CPU, 3GB RAM and Intel 4 series express chipset for graphics. Picked it up years ago for dirt cheap at a black Friday sale. The frame rate was terrible. TSX-ON was a slideshow, especially with everything on MAX. and running the Donner Pass route. How slow did this laptop run RW1012? With TSX-OFF, filtering, AA and quality sliders either on OFF or the lowest it would go....my in-game counter newer said anything but 14fps. Which means it was usually less. And that's even on the smallest route....Testtrak.

I played with 2012 on the my new (2 month old) current laptop (specs in sig) for a couple weeks before the update. I don't know if it's cuz I never paid attention before or what... but it seems like I have more object pop-up in 2013 then I did before. I've got plenty of RAM and a decent rig. I have all the settings on max. so I have max draw distance running. Just seems the stuff in the distance pops in more then before. Like I said... it could simply be I was never paying attention to it in 2012. That.... or the fact that maybe I'm remembering it on my old laptop where the settings were so low to play it decently, there wasn't enough draw distance to SEE distant objects pop-in.

Another thing I noticed since running it on my new laptop was that the other locos are nothing but a smoke and sound show. They don't seem to add any tractive effort as best I can tell. All bark and no bite. My old laptop was too slow to notice this I suppose.

I was also shocked by the unusually quick load up and speed of my SD70 locos. Much quicker then even the SD40-2s. I also noticed that you need the train's brakes above like 30% before they engage on these SD70s as well. I was used to popping it on only 3% on my other locos to slowly shave off speed. Not the cases with these. The SD must mean Speed Demon in this case. Easy to get speed, hard to stop.

Look forward to this route if it gets done. I'm always down for more mountain routes!!!! I'm more of a slow and steady guy when it comes to my trains. Not into high speed nearly as much.