North Staffs Elevation

Sorry it's been a little quiet on the blog front just lately, lots of file editing doesn't really make for a blog post with eye candy!

However, I do have a WIP screenshot for North Staffs Minerals showing the newly re-laid mainline complete with a class 86 leaning into the super elevated curves, sorry that there's not much else going on in the picture.

In quite a bold move our route builder took a look at the new features in RailWorks 3 and decided he wanted to restart the track laying to ensure the route was to Train Simulator 2012 standards.

What has been created so far is definitely impressive and I'm confident that we made the correct choice on this one.

Brakes and Lights GUV?

It's been a surprisingly hard slog today to get the under frame and equipment underneath the generic GUV shape.

Sometimes you can have too much information and there even came a point where Pythagoras had to be used.

The under frame itself is complete now and all the equipment bits are there with the exception of the air tank, distributor and actuators to add.

Just bogies and the buffer beam detailing to add after that.

Mystery Parts of a New Model

Here's a bit of a guessing game.

We've always hinted that there would be more to the 'Night Capitals' stock pack than the Newton Chambers Car Carrier and the GUV but we've never said what.

I started work on one of the other items today, can you guess what it is yet ...?

Painted Urchin

The majority of time since the release of the VDA vans has been spent (other than taking a bit of a break) getting the ZCA Sea Urchin completed and ready for master shapes to be given the once over by the testers.

The model shown is just about ready for a final check before the different versions are created, all that's needed is the magic to make that tail lamp flash!

Speaking of tail lamps, this is now the fourth different model we've created and all by chance for this one. An offhand comment from one of the team following the preview of the original lamp modelled set in motion a fortunate series of events. 

The original comment was along the lines of "I hope we're going to include the BR flashing tail lamp" and received a reply of "That's what I've done". "Oh no", comes the reply, "They were bigger". Not a popular comment to make after the difficulty of finding enough references for (what's turned out to be) a mark 3 lamp!

By total chance in less than 24 hours an email arrived from the same team member that he'd got pictures and measurements of a BR lamp and everything that was needed to create the lamp in the screenshot. Now all that's needed is simulate the weight of the thing as he remarked "It was just as heavy as I remember them!"

Now, should we track down a mark 2 lamp just to complete the set ...?