Railworks America

For those of you who are active elsewhere, you might have seen bits and pieces of this one already. For those of you who are not, I've been working away at a new TOFC car for some time now. The F89F was one of the first widespread types of 89' flatcar, so it should be a good choice for scenarios from the mid 1960s through to the early 2010s. There's a minor laundry list of things left to finish, like hitches for the trailers, but overall I'm happy enough with the progress to make a post about it


Models for trailers and such are still pending. I have a 40' Fruehauf Z-Van which I will probably stretch to 45' as well, but for earlier varieties I am open to suggestions. I may also do an autorack version from this basic template -- the Machine Rail variety are based I believe on the separate F89J class, and I don't think this kind has been done before for TS. For those of you interested in the technical details, the model currently stands at around 77k tris, 24k of which come from the springs alone (!) and will be baked away by the time texturing comes around. With the small library of standard components I modeled for this, I'm hoping to do other rolling stock as well in the coming months. Some new coil cars wouldn't go amiss...

p.s. if anyone has paint information about these, shoot it my way! Models and text references suggest that railroads owned these cars too, but I haven't been able to find real photos to back this up.

Excellent work!

Real life unfortunately has a way of catching up, and I haven't made a ton of progress on these since about this time last year. As a small side project, I adjusted the 40' trailer to be the correct length. It previously was somewhere between 40-45' due to incorrectly scaled diagrams. With this change, I've made both 40' and 45' versions of the Z-Van.

Work still continues in the background to get the F89F actually on the rails as an item of rolling stock. If anyone has guidance I'm all ears -- most of the advice online is for British two-axle items, which have a different setup than these for the bogie parenting which seems to elude me. For now, it's a scenery item with placeholder textures until I can get that part figured out. The bulk of the outstanding work is in the variants, especially the later RTTX etc. versions with newer trailer hitches which have proven difficult to find good reference for. I suspect my interpretation of these will be more of a best guess than anything.

As ever, questions, comments, or concerns are welcome. I'm hoping to have these on the rails for the next update, which will clear the major hurdle of the project and hopefully get things moving in the right direction again.

Well done MAtt. Your modelling work is awesome and excellent. As you know, In the past, I have done many van skins for TSC and I would like to suggest that when you bake the skins on the 3D model that we have at least five well defined independant surfaces (thus textures) for the box - front, rear, two sides and top. Make sure they are not mirrored surfaces.
Another suggestion would be the different rear door options ( with American Truck Simulator you can get great a superb examples. And, do not forget the vans with partial or full tarpaulin cover; even curtain style cover.
I would be glad to help you in any manner to test any 3D model if necessary.
You are definitely on the right track.
Bernard.

That is a true work of art. Nicely done on both the flatcar and the trailers.

That is some very nice equipment! Beautiful work!!