Rotherham Main Colliery, Ickles Wagon Works and Masbrough sorting Sidings:

Rotherham Central Here's a quick update just to show track laying for Rotherham Central and its' approach:

Area Map North West

started laying track - finally

A Slight change of mind with major consequences

Ok, so I thought everything was going along all nice and fine. The layout was coming together well, both parts had been exported to Trainz but, then the fun started. On trying to merge the two routes I found out that some of the maps would be missing. Might not sound like an issue but there was all of a sudden no maps/plans of my home town which to me seemed to defeat the whole exercise. Any way, I've decided to really push my computer to the limit, hope this works, but I'm going to create the layout as 1 part i.e. no route merging. At the same time I'm going to extend the scope of the area covered to include Barnsley in the NW quadrant and Worksop in the SW quadrant. A lot more work is therefore involved but I suppose it will give me a more complete area operationally.

It's Been A While

Ok so things have changed, layouts have come and gone, but the desire to build an accurate model of the railways around where I live has stayed the same. So for the last year or so I've been playing around with a few ideas, experimenting with Transdem and basically making more than a few false starts. I have now settled on a area to model. Well two areas that will later be joined. The first is Rotherham to Chesterfield, the second - Doncaster area to Rotherham. I've spent some time sourcing the maps to use as a base layout and after finding a way to erm 'retrieve' these maps I have then used Transdem to import them into Trainz. Well that was until Roland , the author of Transdem, gave us a new way of working with prototypical maps i.e. 3D tiles. This meant starting over, again! It really wasn't too much work seeing as I had all the data already. Anyway thought I would post a few screenies of the layout under construction using 3D Tiles in Transdem. I will endeavour to post frequent updates to this blog.

Parkgate and Rawmarsh Station

and here's the track layed around Parkgate and Rawmarsh

Stubbin Pit

I've laid the track for Stubbin Pit (nr Greasbrough) part of OS Grid SK4808 which is the grid I'm currently working on.

First Post

So what is it for?

Well, I've started creating a prototypical route in Trainz 2012 that covers the area from Sheffield to Doncaster.  I've set a target period of about 1935 and chose to model as accurately as possible the track layout at that time using old maps geo-referenced and imported into TransDem then into Trainz.

It's a lot of work but I think It'll be worth it in the end.  And it's the end that this blog is for.  I need to show progress to generate progress.  If I leave this as a private venture then nothing will get finalised but if I have to show some development then this blog should spur me on niceley.