1925 A1 Berkshire (Gumboots Locomotive Works)

[Gumboots]

Was just reminded of something. This here Berky uses the same tender as the default H10 and the custom NYC J1 Hudson. All I did was take the same tender geometry and split it out to its own file, then add a second side to it.

This means that if anyone is skinning up the default H10 or the Hudson, or even if they just want a USRA style of tender for anything, nicking the one out of this Berkshire would be the way to go. If you do that you'll be able to have your custom text the right way around on both sides of the tender.

[Gumboots]

Had another look at this old beast, now that it's going to be pretty easy to fix some of the things that were just too much hassle via manual hex editing. It's been imported into Blender and I've already fixed a stack of reversed normals, just for fun.

At some point I'll make the shorter tender with the high rolled top on it, that was used by B&A etc. The default black loco, or the alternative green one with the green boiler, will be able to use either style of tender just by simple renaming of a tender skin file. Obviously either or both of these tenders would also be usable with other Berkshire skins, or with other custom locomotives.

A1_Berkshire_skinned.jpg

[Gumboots]

I had a PM from AMD 103, asking if my offer made almost 5 years ago still stood:

Some people might be wondering what the company initials "B.T.R.D." stand for, and why the locomotive is going to be numbered "2152". I chose B.T.R.D. for the company name as it hasn't been in operation for more than a century now and is rather obscure. This means it wont be mentally associated with any particular location by most people, making it good for use in any location.

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Special Christmas bonus offer

"BTRD" does have an actual meaning. So does the loco number of "2152".

The first person who can tell me what "BTRD" really stands for and why the loco is numbered "2152" can have a custom skin with company name, company logo and locomotive number of their choice.

Said PM included the correct guess for the meaning of BTRD, namely Bob the Railway Dog.

Bob the Railway Dog (also known as "Terowie Bob") is part of South Australian Railways folklore. He travelled the South Australian Railways system in the later part of the 19th century, and was known widely to railwaymen of the day.

I suspect nobody has noticed yet, but when I did the black skin for the SAR Class 500 Northern I made it with "Sir Robert Terowie" on the nameplates. The green skin for that loco has the actual name of the first of the class (Sir Malcolm Barclay-Harvey) but I had a bit of fun with the black one.

AMD also figured out the reason for the loco number being 2152: it's a simple code that uses the positions of letters in the alphabet, and is Bob's name (B=2, O=15, B=2).

So, since it's almost Christmas, even if it's five years later, we discussed what he wanted for a custom skin and I whipped it up.
It looks like this:

In_game_0.jpg

In_game_1.jpg

In_game_2.jpg

The PK4 is in the zip is attached below. Just extract it to UserExtraContent or PopTopExtraContent (either folder will work).
I'll get it sorted on the right archives page during the week, but for now you can grab it here if you want it.

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Edit: Got a minor bug. For some reason (ie: brain not working) I made the number on the headlight plates as 9083 instead of 9803, and I also named all the files as 9083 instead of 9803. So I'll fix that and upload the thing again. Update: It's fixed now.

Which now has me thinking that I might as well tweak the graphics a bit and have two different skins: 9803 and 9083. Why not? Bit of fun, and hardly any work.

[AMD 103]

You probably know I'll only use 9803.

As I explained to GumBoots, 9803 is supposed to represent the years of PopTop's Railroad Tycoon Releases. (1998 for Railroad Tycoon 2, and 2003 for Railroad Tycoon 3.) 98-03.

That's also why it's called PT&S 9803, instead of something else. Because for some reason, I really kinda like having some locomotives in PopTop games having PopTop on them in some way.

Probably something from me growing up RT2 and especially RT3 with them no doubt.

[Gumboots]

Yes, but I wasn't suggesting the extra skin for you. It was easy to make the first one, but I'm not all that keen on it myself, so I'm tempted to do one that is more to my taste just for the heck of it.

[AMD 103]

Go ahead and do make another version. It's your skin, and it's just a favor to me for winning some sort of weird prize.

(I'll admit, 9803 is something of a awkward number.)

[Gumboots]

Y'know this thing really does need a revamp. Turns out the flipped normals in a few places are easy to fix, because the Blender import script ignores normals in the .3dp and just lets Blender calculate them after the model is imported. That means flipped ones are automatically fixed just by importing the model. Can't get easier than that.

And there's several other things it would benefit from. Tender wheels could be actual wheels (not at all difficult to do now), and the tender skin could be done as 1024x512 instead of 1024x1024 (would save half a meg for the graphics card). Plus the original A1's (the A1a and A1b) had four wheel tenders on 70 ton Andrews trucks, and I happen to know a bloke who recently made Andrews trucks for some tank cars anyway. Can easily add some extra faces to the boiler, etc to make things less blocky. So there's quite a bit of scope for tweaking the thing up without it being too much drama.

I already had done a fair bit of this stuff just when messing around in Blender between doing other things, so I think I'll pencil in a revamp for early in the new year. Cargo cars first, then locomotives next year.