Bowery - The railways first base.

When I first started Dukeys railway it was a small station called Brigden, this made its way to the main base of the preserved railway called Bowery, (named after mine and Duke's last name of course).

This is the first area I have started work on.

Among the first thought changes to bring it upto date are the following.

• Animated junctions (I've used these on a previous route and they add that little bit of extra realism so I wanted to use them on the new Dukey's Railway
• Better foliage and trees 
• (Since first using trainz in 2001 a lot has moved forward regarding trees and grass, grass is now a widely used item which can increase the realism of a scene tenfold, working well for trackside detail and overgrown areas. 
• Trees on the other hand have also come a long way with the advent of 3d trees, or speed trees. At first rather ugly, many members of the community have created great trees for use in routes, the ones I will be using in mine are by a Russian creator known as 'Pofig' these trees are of utmost quality and don't impact performance as much as others yet still look great! 
• High qualtiy textures
• With TS09 onwards the grid size of baseboards could be increased from 10m to 5m allowing much smoother hills and harsher embankments/cuttings. Another aspect is texture size, allowing ground textures to be of much higher resolutions. For this I am going to attempt to create higher quality versions of old default textures along with using new textures.

There are of course other changes that are obvious and some not so, including the use of rules and driver commands enabling you to have lots of trains running automatically to timetables which helps for realism, immersion and creating user driven activity's where these trains will be seen and passed!

Now for some shots of the old, original Dukeys railway so you can see how it was and what I have to work with..

This route file is dated 2006, please bare in mind by me opening it in TS12 there are numerous missing assets as well as annomalys (like that giant BW text) aswell as TS12 changing the track and various things as the originals no longer exist or have been obseleted.. I'm sure you can see from old screenshots I have shared in previous post that it did look better than the mess it looks in TS12!!

And here are some screenshots of the same area from around 2006/7 in an earlier version of Trainz where it wasn't so ugly.

In the next post I hope to show you progress on the new 2012 update in progress version of Bowery!!

Heres a sneak peek!  See if you can recognise the spot in comparison to the older shots.