Southern Railways "Schools" V class [WIP]

[Gumboots]

Ok, how's this for lateral thinking?

So I'm making a Schools class choofer, just for the fun of it, and that eventually got me into thinking about how it could be used. After looking around a bit and pondering the situation, I realised that it's really a bit of an orphan at the moment. It could be used in umpteen scenarios, but doesn't have a special place as things stand.

An obvious solution is to make a specifically Southern Railway scenario, which has quite a bit of scope for being interesting. The grouping of smaller railways was in 1923, and BR nationalisation was in 1948. This means Southern itself was in existence for 25 years, the standard RT3 scenario length, and that period spanned everything from the Roaring Twenties, to the '29 crash and Great Depression, followed by economic recovery, followed again by that stupid war some silly people wanted to start. This means there are plenty of possible events to throw into the mix, and cargo targets can be changed for some years to add some extra strategy.

The other thing is that Southern was unusual among UK railways, in that around 75% of its income in non-war years was from passenger cargo. This changed to about 60% freight in some war years, but for most of the time Southern was very heavily reliant on express. This means the scenario should be coded to reflect that, and a scenario that heavily emphasises pax haulage is unusual anyway. Unusual is good, since it would take the emphasis off industry and require a different playing style. People often wonder about how to maximise pax haulage, and this might be a good way to find out. The intention here is to have at least one un-mergeable AI railway (GWR and SR shared some of the same territory and lines) and have a requirement that SR ends up with more loot, which it will have to get from massive pax haulage while GWR will have access to heavy industry as well.

Problem: RT3's editor is, once again, letting us down with its range of options. It has heaps of useless options that nobody ever wants, but lacks some really good ones. You can get industry profit in event conditions, but there is no way you can get express revenue or freight revenue. This is a bummer because I was initially thinking of having a pax revenue target. Pax loads is useless since that can be baited and switched if anyone wants to. Revenue can't be cheated, but also can't be coded.

Looks like the only way of doing it is to use territories, with heavy passenger production and limited industry in the areas Southern has access to. This is a crude substitute but should be workable.

So this is all looking promising as a scenario basis, then I got to thinking of other stuff. Southern also owned hotels, ports, and ships as part of its business empire. Hotels are a no brainer. Ports can be user-built or pre-placed. What about ships? This is when I vaguely remembered something about the British Miracle map, which I've never played, having "steamship lines" in it. I downloaded that map and took a look at it, and the "steamship lines" are just ordinary tracks and trains running across blue-painted zero-altitude land bridges through the ocean.

This is a cute idea. OTOH I don't like it. It looks daft to me to have tracks and trains running over the ocean. I couldn't put up with that myself, and was a bit disgruntled about it all. Then I realised something: it's just a skinning problem. As long as you only want steam trains (like me) there will be the modelling for electric track sitting around unused. The actual track model is the same for all track, with the difference being the catenary model for the flying fusebox tracks. Obviously a custom catenary model could be made and dropped into UEC. This could then be skinned to cover the tracks with nice ocean waves or whatever, but for game purposes would still be "electric track".

So, if territories are set up so that electric track is only affordable across the ocean, then you can have a rail network full of steam locos and your electric locos will be limited to the oceans. To stop idiots running choofers across oceans, similar territory tricks could be used to nobble oceanic choofers so they would be far too slow and unreliable to bother with, with the result that people would only use "electric locos" for crossing water. The obvious trick here is to skin an "electric loco" as a, you guessed it, steamship. This can have speed, hauling power, cost, whatever, tweaked to something suitable. For example, it could chew masses of fuel and be expensive to buy, but haul masses of stuff with perfect reliability and low maintenance costs, along with great pax appeal.

Ok, so if that's a possibility, how to handle stations? Again, just a skinning problem. There's no reason why one unused architectural style couldn't be co-opted to give stations that look like steamship ports. If only using Victorian, Tudor and (possibly) Clapboard station styles for a UK scenario, that leaves the Kyoto and Southwest styles up for grabs. So, just skin them up as ports and set the architectural style to suit for your steamship territories.

So, we could, within the limitation of no electric locos on land, get steamship lines that look like steamship lines.

[Gumboots]

Here ya go. Basic proof of concept.

So the deal is that all the game knows is that the first cargo car attaches to the "rear length point" of the loco or tender, depending on if there's a tender or not. In this case, obviously there is no tender.

So, if the rear length point is defined as being about 20 feet back from the bow or whatever, the game should handily suck all the cargo cars up inside the ship's hull. Nothing else will be following the ship anyway, so no problem. As long as the ship is about 10-20% longer than the longest load you want to haul it should be fine.

The only caveats are obviously to do with behaviour around corners, and behaviour at stations. Since any ocean routes should be pretty straight, corners shouldn't be much of a problem. The ship is naturally going to be three or four times the width of the cargo cars anyway. That means there should be some tolerance for shallow angles in the track, so as long as you can give the ship a fairly straight run into port and put of port it should look fine.

Behaviour at stations is still likely to be a bit odd, given how RT3 likes to pull cargo cars out of thin air sometimes, or to double them back up the track in front of the loco when starting off. Nothing to be done about that except live with it, but it shouldn't be too weird, or not any weirder than RT3 already is.

Basic_steamship.jpg

Basic_steamship_full_load.jpg

Another possibility for freight haulage would be to make a small tramp steamer that hauls a barge. The barge would be the tender, and the freight cars would sit on top of it.

[Hawk]

Now that's an interesting concept.

[Gumboots]

Isn't it just? Ever since I thought of it I've been thinking this is so cool it's just got to be done. It's an ideal way of extending the locomotive roster and scenario options for us players who never like electric anyway. You can have diesel or steam locos on land, whichever you prefer, or both, and still have a good and completely new use for electric track, and open up new ways of using oceans in scenarios. Quite apart from the general visual coolness of having steamships at the dock, loading your stuff.

The only other catch apart from corners is if we also want to go with multiple freight cars. If the length of the consist is doubled or tripled then, since the cars are one-size-fits-all and can't be assigned via territory, obviously the length of the ship would also have to be doubled or tripled to fit them all in. At some point this is likely to get unwieldy.

Still, I think this concept is definitely worth messing around with.

[Hawk]

One thing I wonder is how you're going to lay track in the ocean.

[Bcbuhler]

You could take this steamship idea so far as to have a scenario that covers the whole world and try to transport stuff across the globe. Although map size would limit it it would be cool to try and run the whole worlds transportation network.

[Gumboots]

One thing I wonder is how you're going to lay track in the ocean.

Predetermined shipping lanes, starting and ending at defined port territories. There are two ways this could be done. One obvious way is to mark out the zero altitude land bridges across the ocean, without changing the background colour of them (they will just stay blue). In this case you would lay your own "electric track" when you wanted a trans-ocean connection. Since the ocean is free, I was thinking of using territory tricks to set track laying cost and track maintenance cost to zero (or -100% in event terms). I'd also set sand and oil consumption to -100%. Station building cost should probably be doubled, at a rough guess.

The other option is to pre-lay the track on the land bridges and then set it back to ocean in the editor. You can actually do this and it will work. I tried it last night. That way your shipping lanes would already be in place, and all you would have to do would be drop a station (skinned as a port) at each end of the shipping lane. This may be a better way of dealing with it, at least for some cases.

TBH I haven't fully thought through all the possible strategic options here. There are going to be several of them, and different scenarios will probably use different options.

You could take this steamship idea so far as to have a scenario that covers the whole world and try to transport stuff across the globe. Although map size would limit it it would be cool to try and run the whole worlds transportation network.

Go for it. I'll be making ships anyway.

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I've just taken a bit of a look at the track skinning. So far I don't know where the actual base track .3dp is defined, but in this case it doesn't matter. I've found the .3dp and skin files for the catenary, which is the bit required. The catenary maps to the *Catenary*T_body.3dp, Infrastructure_*.dds, and TrackTexture_*.dds files. Pix attached.

These are quite simple skinning prospects. The skin for the overhead wires in TrackTexture_*.dds can just be alpha'd out. The pylons and other bits in Infrastructure_*.dds can be re-mapped to the same areas but with different graphics, or to blank areas of the same image. Since there appear to be substantial blank areas anyway this shouldn't be a problem.

Obviously it would also be possible to change/improve the track and infrastructure skinning at some point, if anyone wanted to.

TrackTexture_A-copy.jpg

Infrastructure_A-copy.jpg

LCatenaryDT_body.jpg

[RulerofRails]

Way to go Gumboots! That will make for a most interesting and unique scenario.

[Gumboots]

Yeah the concept is starting to take shape now. Obviously it's not even to alpha stage yet, but I'm thinking the map should include a lot of area that isn't actually usable by your (land) trains. Normally this would be a bad idea, but I think in this case it could work well.

The inaccessible areas in the UK itself would be the other UK railways, which would be coded to provide competition in some form (revenue targets, loads hauled, mergers, whatever) or just to supply the heavy freight from outside Southern's area. I'm even toying with the prospect of allowing the player to prevent nationalisation in 1948 if they play well enough, so if you're good enough you won't lose chairmanship and will be able to keep sandboxing, or maybe even make this a Gold requirement. Not sure. All still up for grabs, but it'd make sense to include areas of shared track with GWR to mimic the way it actually was. There may be a connection and/or haulage competition in the shared areas.

Anyway, the other big one is France. That wouldn't be accessible or mergable, but would be a great generator of cross-Channel express and freight in the pre-war years. So although a substantial portion of the map will be ocean, using that ocean will be essential to your strategy. Obviously the war will knacker all that trade, but I'm pondering ways to simulate the evacuation of Allied troops in 1940 with massive troops haulage, probably at a loss. This would be reversed in 1944, when you'd have to ship heaps of all sorts of stuff to France, probably at a loss again. May also add "U boats" and similar evils to the shipping lanes in the war years, with the open ocean to the west possibly allowing convoys, etc.

Lots of scope for all sorts of things anyway. Will just be a matter or nailing it down to something good. TBH I don't really like the idea of bringing wars into RT3, since one of the good things about RT3 is the lack of fragging, and wars are generally not a good thing anyway, but in this case putting up with a few years of simulated war could work. I already have some good ideas for some apocryphal Winston Churchill quotes.

[Gumboots]

I just ran a quick and rough test on this shipping idea. I took the old H10 Double Header test model and changed the length points on the "loco" (ie: first/loco tender combo) and the "tender" (ie: second loco/tender combo) so that both had their rear length points in the same place as their front length points.

As you can see in the screenshot, what this does is suck the second loco/tender combo right up forward so that it is in the same location as the first loco/tender combo, giving the appearance that there is only one unit. The cargo cars then start from the same "rear" length point, which is now at the front, so the first cargo car is entirely within the loco/tender unit, and the second cargo car is approximately half embedded, with the rest trailing behind as you'd expect.

This makes it clear that if the tender body had been extended far enough backwards, all cargo cars would be embedded inside it. I thought it would work, but given how RT3 has a nasty habit of throwing weird curve balls at strange times and for no apparent reason, I figured I should do a basic check before getting carried away. Looks like it's all good.

Quick_shipping_test.jpg