Southern Pacific Shasta Route - Development Thread

[PerryPlatypus]

Greetings all,

For my next route project, I am pursuing Southern Pacific's Shasta Route, specifically the entirety of SP's Black Butte Subdivision between Dunsmuir, CA and Klamath Falls, OR set in the mid 1990's. To avoid any confusion right from the get go: this route will be payware through TrainSimulations, and is only in its beginning stages, so there is absolutely no timeline for completion yet. As of tonight, track is complete for about 75% of the route approximately, scenery just getting started. Loooong way to go.

This route, like Mullan, will be designed specifically for Open Rails. Throughout my Mullan Pass project, I learned a lot and made plenty of mistakes, and I hope to capitalize on all that was learned to make this project a less bumpy ride, but only time will tell what ultimately happens.

As a bit of an intro to the route: The route features a grueling, twisting 2.2% max mountain grade climb up out of Dunsmuir via Cantara Loop, an incredibly scenic section of the route that circles right around the base of the massive stratovolcano known as Mount Shasta, many miles twisting through the arid pine forests on the east side of the Cascades, some flat, high speed sprints across agricultural valleys, and two major yards (Dunsmuir and Klamath Falls). This route is mostly rural, and is one of the most scenic routes in the western United States.

I chose the 1990's to focus in on the unique and exciting final years of Southern Pacific operations: A time when modern power like SD70M's and GP60's mingled with older tunnel motors and the like; the high priority PCX (Pacific Coast Express) intermodal trains and Swift Roadrailers ran on the I-5 Corridor; Dash 8-32BWH "Pepsi Cans" lead the Coast Starlight; sugar beet trains ran out of the Modoc Plateau and off the McCloud Railway heading for California; and much more.

Just one screenshot for now, to kick off this project: Three GP60's storm up the grade between Andesite and Cougar with the eastbound Swift Roadrailers, with Mount Shasta dominating the background. (I can't figure out how to properly embed photos in the current forum software, so here is a direct link).

https://www.flickr.com/photos/156798...in/dateposted/

[derekmorton]

Thanks for letting us know, I will start saving. :-)

As this is another Open Rails only route, can we move away from the MSTS "adhesion factor correction" 130%.
We need to get more accurate with all of our settings.

[trainmanaustin]

Nice!

Sent from my SM-G988U using Tapatalk

[R. Steele]

...The route features a grueling, twisting 2.2% max mountain grade climb up out of Dunsmuir via Cantara Loop, an incredibly scenic section of the route that circles right around the base of the massive stratovolcano known as Mount Shasta...

Excellent Sean, just my cuppa...SP, Northern CA, and difficult mountain grades...wow...take your time, have fun, learn more. Thanks.

[conductorchris]

Sean, Mt. Shasta looks great!

To imbed full size pictures on trainsim, do the following:
Attach you picture to the message as you did, then submit the message.
Then open the message and click on the picture. Right click on the picture and copy link.
Then edit your message and add an [IMG] tag, followed by the URL you just copied and then a [/IMG] tag. Re-submit your message.

There has got to be a less clunky way. But I don't know it. I think a lot of people host their image on external hosting sites and drop it into their message that way. But that is not recommended because the external sites come and go and leave behind messages without photos.

Christopher

[whistlestop]

Much looking forward to running the route. Mullan Pass was very nice. Loved the historical element from abandoned road beds to unused tunnels.
Ron from K-Falls Oregon

[PerryPlatypus]

Thanks for letting us know, I will start saving. :-)

As this is another Open Rails only route, can we move away from the MSTS "adhesion factor correction" 130%.
We need to get more accurate with all of our settings.

Hi Derek,

There's actually an interesting reason for that 130% factor for Mullan. I had long felt that the adhesion physics in Open Rails during rain and snowfall were wrong. About 2 months ago, I collaborated with Peter Newell to test out these physics against real world tests performed by Norfolk Southern, and those tests seemed to confirm my suspicions. Peter then modified the adhesion factors for snow and rain to better align with the NS test data.

All of the ENG files developed for Mullan were developed as close to reality as possible, including for adhesion, horsepower, tractive effort, etc. But since we designed Mullan for the Stable version of Open Rails, we had to ensure that the activities would still function in the Stable version, which of course would be long before Peter's adhesion updates were made to the code.

Long story short, if you run with the Mullan locomotives in one of the latest experimental versions of OR with the adhesion correction set to 100%, you should experience very close to reality as far as physics performance, now that the rain and snow coefficients have been modified. But if you try to run at 100% adhesion factor on the Stable version of OR in rain or snow, you are going to have problems with excessive wheelslip due to the incorrect adhesion code. But I must caution that ALL of our activity testing on Mullan was performed using the Stable version in order to reach the largest number of users, so we cannot guarantee that you will not run into any other issues while running experimental versions of OR.

Hope that makes sense, feel free to PM me any other physics questions you have.

[pschlik]

Looks like I've picked the right time to get back in to Open Rails! Mullan really blew my mind, and if we can get more of that, I'll be plenty pleased.

RE Adhesion: I've been making a physics mod thing to bring some older stuff up to sorta the same standard as Mullan and OR Seligman (but also using Gerry's loco physics + some custom dynamic brake physics of my own). Something I noticed in this process is that the adhesion factor correction actually affects brake friction when brake shoe friction curves are at play, so running at the recommended 130% actually leads to stronger braking than running at the more realistic setting of 100%.

That got me wondering-how do you guys choose brake force numbers? Are they designed for 130% adhesion or would they still be reasonable for 100% adhesion? I'm running on 100%, and I'd like to know if that's making my brakes too weak. I've yet to do significant play testing, so I could very well have set up my content to make for uncontrollable trains.

[PerryPlatypus]

Sean, Mt. Shasta looks great!

To imbed full size pictures on trainsim, do the following:
Attach you picture to the message as you did, then submit the message.
Then open the message and click on the picture. Right click on the picture and copy link.
Then edit your message and add an [IMG] tag, followed by the URL you just copied and then a [/IMG] tag. Re-submit your message.

There has got to be a less clunky way. But I don't know it. I think a lot of people host their image on external hosting sites and drop it into their message that way. But that is not recommended because the external sites come and go and leave behind messages without photos.

Christopher

Thanks Chris. I made some attempts at doing that last night, but will try it again manually with the IMG tags like you indicate when I make my next post in this thread.

[motormaster532]

Thank you very much for this project. It will certainly go great as a companion piece for "Cascades Crossing" Brian