Australian steam locos

[Gumboots]

They need to be articulated. It's just a matter of how to do it. The Big Boy does behave like a Mallet if you run it around tight enough corners. Try it on a test section.

There is a bug with it in default form though: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=3638

[Just Crazy Jim]

They need to be articulated. It's just a matter of how to do it. The Big Boy does behave like a Mallet if you run it around tight enough corners. Try it on a test section.

There is a bug with it in default form though: viewtopic.php?f=67&t=3638

Downloading and installing your fix now !

[Gumboots]

I teared up reading the first post in this thread. When we left Rhodesia in 1977, just before my 15th birthday, the train was pulled by a Garret. I grew up seeing them every day, I've not seen one since. I haven't thought about them for years. If no one has made one yet, when my Blender skills are up to snuff, I'm making one.

Just to let you know, I have some drawings and pix for the following classes of Rhodesian Garratts. Not much on the 13th class, but plenty (for RT3 purposes) on the others.

13th Class - That's one of the little ones, a 2-6-2+2-6-2.
14th Class and its 14A variant - Another 2-6-2+2-6-2.
15th Class - The 4-6-4+4-6-4 "express" loco (was built for express, but wasn't fast by Euro/US standards).
16th Class and its 16A variant - That's a 2-8-2+2-8-2 freighter.
20th Class and its 20A variant - Big beastie 4-8-2+2-8-4.

[Just Crazy Jim]

I think I only ever saw one 13th class 2-6-2+2-6-2 in service as a yard engine/switcher, and that was in South Africa (1977). It looked beastly old and ready to fall apart. The others, though, I am fairly certain I've seen all of them in service on Rhodesian rails, albeit, I couldn't tell you from memory which ones. It's been almost 40 years and the memory fades.

[Gumboots]

Hey I found out the story behind the name of "The Fish", which I was wondering about back here:.

The T14's became famous for hauling "The Fish". This had absolutely nothing to do with fish, as far as I can tell. It was the express train from Sydney up to the Blue Mountains. Maybe they hauled a car of fish with it sometimes, since they'd need to ship them fast before they went off? Dunno. Anyway, it was always called "The Fish" and ran until 1958, although obviously they didn't use the T14's that long. The T14's were known to hit 70 mph, which wasn't bad for its' day.

The government archives have a copy of the the Lithgow Mercury from 1945, and it's explained there.

MORE ABOUT "THE FISH"

Still another has taken up the question of how the Blue Mountains train called "The Fish" came by the name. He is Mr. Jim Hartigan, of Penrith, a relief stationmaster in the Penrith district. Mr. Hartigan also deals with the train's contemporary, appropriately named "Chips."

Mr. Hartigan writes as follows:—

In reference to the article in the Lithgow "Mercury" dated 29/10/'45, and the remarks of R. F. Wylie and C. C. Towle, a very fine article on this subject was published in the Sydney "Sunday Times," under date of 4/7/'20, under the heading, "The Evolution of the New South Wales Railways from 1855 until 1920," and discloses some interesting facts about the Fish Train, or as it was called, "John Herron and His Mountain Train."

However, a visit to No. 5 Castlereagh Street, Penrith, to the home of David Herron, Jun., a son of David Herron, who was a loco driver and was killed in the Bell railway smash on the 11/3/1890, substantiates the claim. After viewing all records, and there are many, one can safely say the name "The Fish" was first given to the train because all the crew had names which could be applicable to various types of fish.

I might mention David Herron, now residing in Penrith, is a nephew of John Herron, the original driver of "The Fish." It was in the year 1868 that this train first commenced to run. It left Sydney at 5 p.m. daily Mondays to Fridays, and for some time Parramatta was the destination, but as the population moved out into the country so did the train, hence, in 1870, we find the train, worked by engine No. 15, in charge of John Herron, nicknamed "Hell-Fire Jack", leaving Sydney daily for the mountains. His fireman was John Salmon, and the guard of the train John Pike. It will thus be seen there was a Herron, a Salmon and a Pike on the train, and it was not long before the lads of the service invented the name of "The Fish."

Over the years it has remained, and today it is recognised officially by the Railway Department. In fact, the words "The Fish" are inscribed on sides of the middle car of the train.

To-day "The Fish" is one of the best trains in the State. So great has been the patronage in the past the authorities arranged to run a second division between Valley Heights and Sydney. It did not take regular travellers long to nickname it "The Chips," and to-day that name is accepted officially. Now mountain travellers are catered for daily by "Fish" and "Chips."

Which, to an Australian, all makes perfect sense.

Incidentally, the "engine No.15" mentioned would have been the second in the T class. Back in those days NSWGR named their classes after the roster number of the first loco in the class. The first T was NSW's 14th loco from day one, so they became the T14 class and the numbers just went on from there.

[Gumboots]

Just had another look at the idea of Garratts. Yes, I know I should be doing other things, but we will want Garratts sooner or later. They're going to be a bit trickier than I thought.

I can do them at a reasonable poly count, although they will obviously be higher than some other locomotives.The shapes aren't hard to skin either. The problem is the amount of skin area available. I worked out UV mapping for one of the smallest Garratts I had sitting in Blender, namely the TGR Class M.

TGR_Class_M_1912.jpg

Getting it to this point meant fixing some stuff I'd done ages ago when I last played with the model, and before I knew some of the things I know now. Poly count as shown in the shots is 2104, which IMO is too high for an RT3 loco, but I've gone over it and made an inventory of the mesh and I know how I can knock it back by around 400 or so without spoiling the looks. This would put it in the right ballpark for polys.

Unwrapping the mesh for all components showed up the real limitation: the 1024x1024 maximum texture size locked into RT3.exe. Since this is the smallest Garratt likely to be used in the game, I'd like to model it without using up the tender slot and without calling a second image for skinning the rear unit. I'd prefer to leave those tricks for the bigger ones. Problem is that doing it all on one image, even with being cunning about how things are mapped (ie: making some areas dual or triple use) results in a pretty low resolution for most bits. It comes down effectively to having to skin one loco and two different tenders, instead of just one loco and one tender. This chews up valuable skin space, so you have to make things smaller.

I think this is a case where I am going to have to up my skinning skills, and use the pro's technique of skinning at a larger scale (at least 2048x2048) before shrinking it for the final skin. This is how the pros get decent looks on smaller skins, but I haven't tried it myself yet.

Even if someone decides to call two images for large Garratts, and model the rear unit as an RT3 tender, the 1024x1024 limitation is still a PITA. You can call two 1024x1024 images to skin loco and "tender", which is the same number of pixels for the graphics card to process as a 2048x1024. A 2048x1024 would be more efficient overall, because only one file has to be called even though the number of pixels is the same. But you can't call a single 2048x1024. RT3 won't let you do it, even though it would be a bit easier on the CPU and GPU.

And with Garratts it's even sillier, because all you really want the extra image for is the rear unit tank and coal bunker. All of the drivetrain components are the same for the front and rear units, so can share the same mapping if they are on the same image. But if you use a second image in RT3 you have to duplicate the mapping for the rest of the rear unit (drivetrain, platform, frame plates, etc) onto the second image. If a 2048x1024 was allowed it would all be much simpler and cleaner, and would allow not only a slight reduction in GPU loads but also better resolution for all components due to more space being available.

If we ever get Milo or someone else enthused about more .exe hacking, I reckon this is a very good candidate for a fix.

Edit: Before anyone wonders about it, yes it's fine to use non-square images for game textures as long as they are still "power of 2" based. So 2048x1024 wont cause any problems, nor will 256x512 or any similar ratio. It's only non-PO2 sizes that cause problems.

[Gumboots]

I've been playing around with this Garratt, after getting it running live in the game, to see what improvements I can make to it. What I've found is that RT3 apparently likes Garratts more than I thought it did. It's actually being co-operative, which is very surprising.

Originally I set it up the same way I set up double cargo cars: with the truck pivot points set to 0, 0, 0 like the main body file. This is because back when I tested using other locations for the truck pivots I got very weird results when it was loaded into the game via a saved sandbox.

I just found out tonight that the weird results only happen if I don't replace all the locomotives with the standard in-game locomotive upgrade after making an adjustment. As long as the locos are replaced, things will behave pretty normally. The result is that I can now put the truck pivots exactly where they were on the real locomotive, and by adjusting the track points I can make them follow the track properly around corners, so the ruddy thing is now behaving like the real McCoy in terms of geometry. This is cool.

I should even be able to use this knowledge to improve my double and triple cargo cars, although TBH it will make only a negligible difference in the case of the doubles. It's probably more relevant to the triples, but there are only a couple of those. Still, it's worth knowing for future work. Anyway, that's one nice little bonus that RT3 has decided to grant us, but there's another one as well.

When setting up working valve gear I was using the same method that was used on the default Beuth: an extra truck that has the extra drivewheels and connecting rods and pistons that make up the valve gear. This has worked well for normal locomotives (ie: not Garratts) as long as the extra truck has its pivot point set to 0,0,0 like the loco body. The Schools class and the SAR Class 520 are done this way, and the valve gear hangs together with the rest of the kit around any corner.

The problem is that it doesn't work with Garratts. I tried it, but the valve gear truck was always taking a different angle around corners to the main truck. This meant it looked like complete crap, so I grumbled about it a bit then tried several possible fixes. Some of these were quite inventive, but none of them worked.

Eventually, on the point of giving up and saying "Ok, maybe Garratts can't have valve gear in RT3", I decided to try one last thing: don't use an extra truck, and instead just put the extra drivewheels, etc on the standard two trucks. This means that as well as the usual ****Drivewheel1.3dp and ****Drivewheel2.3dp (along with their pistons, etc) there are also ****Drivewheel3.3dp and ****Drivewheel4.3dp (along with their pistons, etc).

I had assumed this would not work, because after all if it did work then why would PopTop have resorted to an extra truck for the Beuth? Makes no sense, right? I only tried it just for the heck of it, but expected it to be a failure.

It works perfectly.

TGR_Class_M_Better.jpg

[Gumboots]

Oh yeah, about getting the thing to go around corners.

With the "rail whale" tankers (these ones) I just set the truck attachment point and the track point to the same location, halfway between the inner pairs of wheels. This works well for basic simple trucks that are symmetric around their centrepoint, like standard four wheel bogies, etc. For instance, all the pax car trucks are done this way, and it's the usual thing for front trucks on Pacifics or whatever. The rail whale's eight wheel trucks aren't quite symmetric, because they have platforms at one end, but are near enough that it doesn't seem to matter in terms of behaviour around curves.

With the double cargo cars, that are pivoted in the middle of the whole unit, I use a different setup with the track point at about 55% of the overall wheelbase. That works best for those.

This Garratt needed a different solution. The pivot is at 50% of the wheelbase, and the track point needed to go at 65% of the wheelbase for best fudging. However, and this is the tricky bit, although that worked for the "real trucks" (the whole tank/chassis/wheels shebang at each end) it did not work for the simplified "fake trucks for valve gear" that I tried as a first option. They pivoted at the same point, but they consistently wanted to turn to a different (smaller) angle.

It seems that what is happening is that the game engine is using some sort of weighting of the entire mesh of each truck to determine how affected it is by any curve radius. So the simplified valve gear trucks were somehow weighted less internally, resulting in less effect from the curve they were going around. This means that it is likely that different Garratts will require slightly different tweaks of their track points, depending on exactly how the mesh in each truck is arranged. The same could apply to some multiple cargo cars too, depending on how their mesh was arranged, but I haven't noticed it being a problem with those yet.

[RulerofRails]

Good news, RT3 isn't totally insane. Got a good map suggestion to run the Garratt on?

[Gumboots]

Arop did a Tasmania map, which was a typical Arop map in that accomplished players would cream it with years to spare, but it was quite good fun anyway. Apart from that, anything from Africa. Lotsa Garratts in Africa, even if not this particular one.

Edit: Oh, while I remember, quite a lot of Garratts were used in South America too. Ideal country for them, what with all those mountain tracks. Sao Paulo Railway was fond of them, and was one of the richest railways in the world at one time.