Good Evening. I came to you all today to showoff my Fictional Interurban route called Southern Corridor.
This Route era is designed to take place around from 1920 the 1950's.
My goal is to have the route simulate Line of sight, street running, and high speed Interurban, and streetcar operations for both passengers, and freight. with a minimal of signals.
The Route location in this fictional world is still on the cutting room floor. however the general location is somewhere in North Texas.
At this moment most of the route still needs to materialize from concept, However The last, and southern most city of this railroad has come into existence as the City of Manoford
V : Southern Manoford Old Interurban/Streetcar terminal Building/ Interurban headquarters
The City of Manoford is a member city of a Greater southern Municipal county that has yet to be named, and has 4 districts: Southen : suburb : Downtown : Upper.
The city has 2 lines that cross the city 4 mile radius. The northern most line is a high speed suburban Light rail bypass line that serves the District of Upper Manoford, and connects it to southern, and the new downtown Transit center.
However this line cannot handle heavy freight due to the marshy nature of the land the line was built on, and all freight that comes in through that line must be shuttled with a light weight freight motor consist.
(This interurban features a simple child object modification to block out the passenger windows and allow it to appear as if it's a freight motor.)
The southern most line is the old suburban line that connects southern manoford, to the suburb, and then downtown. Street running on this line is continuous until manoford city hall is reached.
Downtown Manoford along with Upper Manoford are the youngest parts of the city, and in order to combat congestion due to the rise of traffic of both local, and intercity traffic. "The Downtown Manoford Transit Center"; Or D.M.T.C was created to decrease both Passenger, and freight traffic congestion. The local Manoford Municipal streetcars run shuttle services between Southern, Upper, and Downtown Manoford daily.
Along with Interurban service, The line also interchanges with West, & East ward bound Class 3 Mainline that connects with the transit center.
For know I'm still running detail passes over the route to clean it up, but overall this short section highlights all of the custom features That i worked into this route, that i will now begin to share now.
Route features:
1: Reactive Traffic, and busy roads.
This route was bulit on this very concept at the very start. The game proved that having Street running with reactive cars was a possible concept. however. This concept really pushes the game to it limit. This mechanic is powered by a constant array of level crossings from the Sacramento northern route. and this mechanic is not without it's limitations.
For instance while cars can stop for you, and other AI trains. AI Trains that are behind you are unable to do the same, and might clip into the cars.
1:The cars don't like long trains, and their wait script might timeout if ai trains are told to load instead of wait, or if you stay idle for too long.
2: You must maintain a distance of at least 20 feet from the rears of cars, or they will Stop right in front of you.
3: Due to the amount of cars when entering onto the street you must enter slowly at a speed of at least 10 miles per hour to allow the cars to recognize you, and stop.
4: In the picture above the road is using a slightly modified Traffic manager to allow the amount of traffic above. however I was unable to make the traffic constant, and the traffic will usually only spawn in burst, or not at all.
a Map restart is required to make the cars spawn.
Other than those limitations this feature works well.
Flagman warning device.
This asset is of my own creation, and it's designed to warn players of incoming mainline trains. that will always have priority over the interurban's, and streetcars.
The flagman will warn you 2 mins in advance of a mainline train, and will keep waving until the two minutes are up, and will reset on it's own.
The limitations of the flagman is in its programming. The flagman is powered by a standard level crossing script. and my lack of experience with LUA coding means the flagman is not adaptable, and will only wave for two mins every time it is triggered. However its not really that much of an issue. I plan to releases the flagman standalone when phase one of the route is completed which is imminent, however please be aware of the limitation if you plan to use the flag man on different routes.
For now that is all the Features I developed for this route, and Thank you for taking the time to Read my post. I will now leave you off with two videos of passenger, and freight operations on this route, and i hope to release it soon.
https://youtu.be/MWjX0wBLBr8
https://youtu.be/v6fS6SaEoaY
