The NEW Hartford & Springfield St. Ry., Pt. 2

20 March 2007: It’s the first day of Spring, but with a foot of fresh snow on the ground, my plans to drive the route of the old (and new) Hartford & Springfield Street Railway will have to wait. Meanwhile, I’ve been busy playing in my indoor sandbox. That’s the test bed route I call AB-Sandbox. It’s where I try out things before committing them to a route I’m working on or planning. In case you’re wondering, the AB – my initials – put the layout at the top of the list where it’s easy to find.

So far I’ve used the sandbox for testing several techniques: the canal at Windsor Locks, the street trackage in East Hartford, and the large trolley barn at Warehouse Point. I described these briefly in part 1. Now I’ll go into them a little more deeply. In this progress report I’ll describe building the canal at Windsor Locks.

Questions, Questions, Questions

The canal at Windsor Locks is one feature I wanted to include in the route. Obviously it’s the reason for the town’s name, but it’s also prominent from the Amtrak train that runs beside it and stops alongside it at the Windsor Locks station and it is a registered historic place. How well it could be modeled was another matter. Some answers to life might be “blowing in the wind,” but these I would have to find by “digging in the sand.”

Was there a suitable retaining wall packaged with TRS2006 and what sort of horizontal surface would it provide to tie back into the landscape? I could tell from the Google Earth satellite photos that along sections of the canal there were both crisp edges (as in a wall) and soft edges (as in an embankment). I needed a plausible retaining wall that could be tied into the landscape.

How would the wall tie into the scenery? As we know, Trainz does not permit the topography surface to be vertical or anything close to vertical, so there is a slope behind the wall I would have to hide. Also, I would have to figure out how to transition from wall to embankment.

How deep and wide would the canal be? Shallower and narrower were my goals. The Trainz topo grid has limitations as to how steep an embankment can be and in minimum widths (grid squares) that can be manipulated.

What water level would I need to use? There would have to be some kind of trade-off here because water level, especially where locks are concerned, must vary. I could tell from the drawn plan and from having stopped at the station, that there was and is at least one bridge crossing the canal. It would have to provide clearance for boats.

What suitable buildings does TRS2006 provide? I know there were buildings alongside the canal because some are still there. These are industrial/mill type buildings, plain and functional. I needed to look at all available options.

Developing the Scheme

Determining minimum width. I laid out three parallel sections of track with the middle section several feet below the ground. Then I applied the Smooth spline height ‘S’ tool to each section. The best I could do was to space the tracks on parallel grid lines, two grid squares apart. This puts the actual below-water width at about one grid square, or 33 feet. The true width, of course, varies according to depth and water level.



Selecting the right wall(s). After some trials I found the most useful wall for me was Arkaden neu 5GI. It has a nice stone texture and lip at the top that gives good definition. It also has a horizontal section that’s easily matched with brown texture. This wall comes in a number of variations, the differences among them being the width of the horizontal section.

I decided to combine a macadam towpath (Lane) along the wall edge and the buildings. The two did a good job of hiding most of the horizontal section. In the current rendition, I’ve omitted the towpath.


Sandbox version. Note good blend between horizontal layer and brown texture. The dividing line is atop the grid line.


Current version. This is a critical juncture because the bridge has to clear the boat, and the road has to rise to meet the bridge. A brick wall hides the space beneath the road.

Ending the wall. Splines like the retaining wall often are open at the ends. This means you have to turn the wall into the landscape or use some other device, like a building, to hide the open end. Here I’ve just turned a right angle and buried the end in the landscape.



Blending the embankment. In tandem with terminating the retaining wall is the blending of textures from the brown of the horizontal surface beyond the wall, the matching brown texture and an appropriate ground texture. I found the GreenGrass1 texture to work beautifully with the brown (Schotter Dunkel).


The blended textures shown here in the sandbox have not yet made their way to the current version, but will in due course.

Finding the right buildings. TRS2006 comes with hundreds of buildings. There’s no substitute for methodically going through them all to see what’s available. In the first screen shot the four shown left to right are pdp10342h, pdp10273 2h, Schuppen3, and yard jib crane. In the second screen shot, which is the current version of the H&S, I’ve placed from the bridge forward on the right side of the canal pdp10342h, Brick Workshop 01, 05DC4586, and ma095pt2. The last building appears to be three buildings, but is one object.

In the third screen shot, also the current version of H&S, I’ve combined four of the pdp10342h to make one large building.







So there we have a canal. I’ve avoided the question of locks, largely because the river, which connects the canal at both ends, has to be level unless I were to introduce a rapids or a dam, neither of which are appropriate here. Also, I think it’s more detail than is justified.

I still have to texture the landscape and add details such as trees, people and vehicles. But the hard work is done – that of figuring out how to build the canal and then doing it. Did I say work? How could playing in the sandbox be work? This is springtime fun!

Al

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