A Great New Idea for Passenger Cars

By John D'Angelo

I really enjoy running my passenger trains. Express, local, limited or commuter, they all give me a lot of pleasure. One thing about passenger cars in Trainz that has bugged me over the years was not being able to easily name them for the roads I was running. Oh yeah, I knew I could label aluminum sided cars by using Paint Shed, even though the smallest print didn’t quite fit, and I have used the Gimp paint program to work with reskinning some cars, but I wished there was a better way to write road names on the old Pullman cars.

Well, I have GREAT news! Thanks to the hard work of Ben Dorsey (bendorsey) at the Trainz Download Station (DLS) there is now a large batch of TOTC Pullman cars that are designed to be custom named by you. TOTC stands for “Turn of the Century,” and the early 1900 Pullmans are real beauties. Last November Ben released his passenger enabled heavyweight cars with 3D interiors. The real killer about his cars is that he has devised a system that lets you give these cars your choice of road name without having to resort to a paint program. Ben originally released the cars in Tuscan Red and has now released additional cars in Pullman Green. His lineup of cars includes baggage, RPO, combine, coach, sleeper, dining car, and observation cars. Do a search under Title at the DLS for “TOTC” and you will see his cars. Shown below is a screen shot of one of his Pullman Green coaches.


Pullman Green coach.

Notice that the writing says “Your Favorite Railroad Name” at the top of the car, and low on the side of the car it says “Car Number”. This is how the car looks after being downloaded. It still needs to be edited for the road name and number.

You don’t need to use a paint program to change the name. All you need to do is edit the config.txt file. Simply change those lines in the config file to the name you want. In TRS2006, I will use CMP to first clone the car, then edit the cloned car with the new name and rename the username line to reflect the changed name.


Clone the original.


Find the cloned car.


Edit in Explorer.


Choose the config.txt file.


Original config file.


Name changed to “New York Central” and number added.


Change Username line.

At this point you would normally save the config.txt file and then commit the change, but I wanted to make just one more change. I wanted the lettering to be yellow instead of the original white. All you need to do is change the color values of the lettering to the values for yellow. I used Paint Shed to find the color value for yellow (Red 241, Green 241, Blue 0) and changed the original values of 255,255,255 to 241, 241, 0 in all the lettering lines. Shown below is the result:


Final NYC coach.

Although this may sound complicated at first, it is really a very easy way to letter your own cars. Also, once you have a car lettered for your line, you could clone that one and only have to change the number for each cloned version. Just be sure to show the number on the Username line. Finally there is an easy way to create all those wonderful road names you have always wanted in early Pullman style passenger enabled cars.

Thank you, Ben, for such a GREAT idea!

John

Article and screen shots ©2007 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.

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