Creating the landscape
I had for years tried to design and build various model railways featuring parts of the Kent and East Sussex, and then latterly the East Kent Light Railway, but even a large model railway can only show a fraction of the extent of the real network. I knew that I wouldn't be satisfied with two boards in a corner of the room; I wanted to travel the line, and I wanted to see the landscape through the carriage windows, not from above like a buzzard with a train-spotting obsession. I wanted that landscape to roll up and down like the chalk hills and clay river plains of North Kent. But MSTS, when you first create the route, presents you with a wide, level, featureless plain, populated only with the markers that you have previously created to show where in that world the roads, railways, rivers, houses, and anything else you intend to populate your new world with should be positioned.
Here, for instance, is the flat plain where I want to see the gentle mound on which Richborough Castle Sidings
and the embankment to the Stour bridges are going to be, with the markers I created in TSTools2 from the 1938 OS map
showing the course of the track, the position of the bridges over the Stour and the SECR main line, and the main line
itself.
Bleak, isn't it?
Whereas this is what I wanted it to look like.
Notice that there is now a gently rolling mound against the skyline. I had experimented with the terrain
adjustment tools in MSTS's Route Editor, and knew that while creating dramatic cliffs and model-railway-like hills
was easy enough, getting such a realistic appearance for a small hill was difficult enough, without having to try
and make it conform to a position on a map.
I had three options available to me
- Manually raise the hills and lower the valleys using the MSTS route editor. (Clumsy)
- Manually trace in the contours from an OS map and use the (free) TSTF or (reasonably-priced) TSTools2 program to terraform the landscape
- Use free hieght data from the shuttle program and load it into the MSTS route editor ready to use.
My time, (then), was limited, as I was working on full-time software contracts, so I took the third option. I would possibly have taken it even if my time hadn't been limited, because I would rather spend my time placing objects in the landscape than meticulously tracing it out.
I downloaded the hieght data files I needed, used the DEMEX program to write their values into the relevant tiles of my flatland, and began to lay the tracks and form the cuttings and embankments. Almost immediately, doubts and uncertainties rose up and created their own landscape, in which I found myself lost. (Isn't that statement an oxymoron?)
And so the story progresses to Uncertain data