Charlie, Do you find yourself

Charlie,

Do you find yourself neglecting your HO railroad in favor of the virtual one (or vice-versa)?

Have you developed a preference for one over the other?

Outstanding!!!!!!!!!!

Charlie,

Absolutely OUTSTANDING !

Jim Six

I’m wait for people say you

I’m wait for people say you can only do model railroading with actual physical models...

getting my popcorn out

Dang it, more money to spend!

One of my other hobbies is PC gaming, I use this same setup I'm typing on for it but I mostly play a game called "Star Citizen" and I've also been looking forward to the new Microsoft Flight Sim. I haven't looked at Train sims in years though but now Charlie has the wheels turning! At least I don't have to invest in the hardware though. I've been building my own PC's for years now and I just recently did a major performance upgrade on this one.

Mark, It can be a battle

Mark,

It can be a battle which one gets my time. The HO wins when an op session is coming up. The simulator wins when I feel more like vegging out.

Charlie / Horace

I'm working to get the

I'm working to get the virtual BC&SJ ready for general usage. I've been saying next month for about the past 3 months but keep finding more stuff to do/fix.

There's a lot more about the virtual BC&SJ on the Trainz Forums at

https://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?151240-Bear-Creek-amp-South-Jackson-progress-reports-Building-a-Mountain-Railroad-(1080p)

and on Horace Fithers YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKkZbM2b7FJAAIj5a6mEjzA

and now I gotta get back to getting the HO BC&SJ ready for the next op session.

Charlie / Horace

About PC's

As a general rule, if you can swing it, building your own PC from component pieces is going to get you a lot more bang for your buck as far as performance. It's really not that hard either. Also watch out for what the big box discount retailers try to pass off as "gaming machines". If you must buy a turn key solution, better to buy it from a more specialized PC outlet IMO.

Aside from an iMac and a

Aside from an iMac and a laptop I've built all my computers for the last 20 years. Heck sometimes it's even fun!

Honestly though, with the new CPUs and GPUs AMD introduced lately prices on those components have been falling.

Of course computer building is another hobby unto itself... 

Charlie

Easy to create content

Content can be created using Blender a free program. if I can do it anyone can.

http://doug56.net/BlenderForTrainz/

Best buy has good deals on gaming computers, that is what I am using right now. Just always check the reviews.

Harold

Happy to see this article

I've been a fan of the train simulators for years and am glad to see they are getting a little "official" press.

The sims were my only active participation in the hobby for many years, and kept my interest "in the hobby" while I wasn't able to work in the physical world.

My opinion has always been that they are an overlooked gateway into the world of of physical models.  We so often hear the complaint about "those kids and their video games" needing a hobby.  Well - here's a way to give them a taste.

I've often used Trainz to build and operate a quick version of a track plan I've seen in MRH or somewhere else. 

If Joe was looking for another subscriber extra, he could add downloadable track plans for Trainz.  I assume he would do this in his spare time. 

gs

That's inspiring Harold. My

That's inspiring Harold. My expertise is more on the hardware than software end but I'm always telling myself I'm going to learn the software end. How long did it take you to learn enough to get that far? Will that content port over to what Charlie is using?

Way back when, I was an MSTS user and I have quite bit of content that I kept telling myself I was going to use with openrails.org but I just never can seem to get to it. Charlie has me dreaming of Trainz now though as it's more up to date. A nice bit of serendipity is that I have a small financial windfall coming and I'm going to be able to earmark some of it for hobby pursuits!

How long did it take you to

The gray building was built from the tutorial and took an evening. Those tutorials are the best.

Here are the buildings on my test oval in TS2019:

Virtual Railroading give another scale to rubber-scale with.

MSTS/Openrails is fun to use just because of the availability of the routes.

Harold

@Charlie Well Done Young Man!

Hi Charlie,

Congrats on the very well done article! But where are the exceptional embedded videos?  Readers are going to think this is all about a bunch of stills!! (Regardless of the Horace Fithers Link.)

Ladies and Gentlemen, watch this for several minutes and get a real idea of what this is all about:

I very much hope this is the one where the train is moving through bad weather -- wonderful! Nonetheless, pay attention to the smoke!

Great job, Charlie. I hope you spend a bit more time in the follow on article describing what it took to put together your PC. Most modelers, barring the gamers already here, will not understand what you are running. I doubt there are many "stock" PC's on the shelf that match the performance of your machine!

You might explain a bit more of the renderings possible. I think it is mind blowing!

Questions: You started with the modeled Bear Creek layout and created a virtual model (VM). Would there be other difficulties building the VM from scratch? Did building the Bear Creek VM give you any "Ah Ha" moments about your Bear Creek layout?

Good fun! 
Best regards,
Geoff Bunza

Drinking from a 3.5" fire hose...

Horace Fithers sez, "See the entire BC&SJ right quick-like."

Napkin not included.

Charlie

Yeesh!

About halfway through I got nauseous! How long does it take to run the whole route at normal speed? My guess is about two and a half hours. Great work Charlie, you have really inspired me to quit spending all my gaming time being a "space pirate" and to get back to virtual railroading. Just waiting on the CFO, also known as the wife, to authorize a software purchase.

The ups and downs of railroading?

Running a train at a more sane pace. 

If one were to run at the speed limits it would likely take almost three hours to go from end of the V-scale BC&SJ.

Charlie

...

Trackplanning software to a new extreme...

My last three computer purchases have all been laptops.

The current laptop is an Acer Predator, purchased for the extra hardware for doing graphics work ...I'm happy with it.  I've stopped building desktops.  Diminishing returns.  Of course, it would be nice to have three monitors, but I'm Ok for now.

The newest BC&SJ virtual scenery

New scenery along the virtual Roberts Creek. I don't this would fit very well in the 20' allocated for the HO scale Roberts Creek!

Charlie / Horace

Trainz has come a long way

Trainz has come a long way over the years. I remember thinking the super low poly-count looked great back when I got the original version. I couldn't believe how user friendly it was compared to Microsoft Train Sim. Some of the screenshots people post are so realistic its hard to tell if they're real life or from the sim. I used it to kick around ideas and paint schemes for my own layout. It ended up growing to be a real daunting project that I kind of lost interest in. I'll go back to it to "pre-build" a model layout on a much smaller scale than a 75 mile route. This was as far as I made it in the end. 

-Tristan

Useful

I used the 'virtual' mode to design my RR and found it very useful.

But I'm not in the 'play mode' with it for I prefer the 'reality' of what I'm building.

ALL IS NOT WELL IN TRAINZ LAND

Before you rush out and spend you're money a funny (not ha ha funny) thing happened to me this morning when I fired up trains to do some work on the virtual BC&SJ.

Scroll up a bit to where I posted the pictures of the latest BC&SJ scenery along Roberts Creek. ALL THE TIES HAVE DISAPPEARED.

I have done nothing to the track in that area.

I hope its not another database corruption.

I'll let y'all know what N3V games tells me when I submit this as a bug report.

Welcome to the dark side of Trainz.

Charlie

Virtual you say? MEH, I say...

Not long ago, I talked with someone who works at DARPA and he told me they're making great strides in holograms, so much so he was sure model railroads would be done by computer in 3D in the next few years. He said your layout room would be an empty room and when you hit the switch, everything would come to life. The trains would do exactly what they'd do in real life, tiny little people and cars would be doing their thing, trains would stop and the passengers would swap out while the crew looked over the head end.

Concerts, he said, would be recorded somewhere and you'd later pay to go to a small venue for a fraction of the money for what your brain would perceive to be the exact same experience than if you'd seen them in person.

He also said historical re-enacting would forever change, too, as they would be able to 'create' ten thousand soldiers at Gettysburg without bending a blade of grass. the only hurdle, he said, at the moment is finding a way for all this to be making sounds from what would appear to be the expected sources...

Audio from expected sourced

This is news?

I messed around with Trainz simulator a little over a decade ago - I think I had the 2007 version. I thought you got pathetically little for your purchase in the way of engines and cars, and they wanted big bucks for every add-on. To me it looked like it could easily consume most of one's hobby dollars. And they come out with another version every year or two and want another wallet-full each time. No thanks.

I'm afraid I didn't pay for the RE article, as to me the whole thing is hardly news, so if there is any real news in there somewhere I'll apologize in advance. Of course the 3d modelling has improved, but so have all the open-world computer games, so that's pretty much a given, not news.