DAR MSTS line BETA 6.2

[Paul Charland]

Hi All,

I see Matt is looking for beta 5.5 but I did create a later beta that I've uploaded. I haven't been working on the route much, thought I would be able to do some work after Google uploaded better satellite shots for the route between Hantsport and Windsor but that are still poor quality and this was illustrated after I thought I was getting the Windsor yard right and posted this beta to Andrew Underwood only to find I mis-read the poor satellite shots and have the yard on the west side of the main instead of the east side of the main.

If you have a look at the bottom of this satellite shot you will easily see the shapes of buildings and a clear view of the roadbed. The upper half of the shot is what they have posted for the line between Hantsport and Windsor. Blobs for buildings and a fuzzy line for track. If the quality of the shot is good you can zoom in and measure buildings, which was able to do for the part of the route I've completed, but when you zoom in on the current offering, all you get is bigger blobs with no detail... so, until something better is posted the route is on hold.

Andrew has generously offered to fly over the area in the spring and take photos for me but what I really need is better satellite shots from Google of Bing, something with a built in measuring tool and the ability to add flags that can be converted to markers and brought into the route I'm working on.



Here is the current beta, might be it for a while. If you have any problems might be better to contact me off list, I'm not in here very much and would probably not get back to you in a timely fashion.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/1xjec8

Andrew had problems with the APK files not installing the consist files on his system. This is one of those strange problems with MSTS, some people have no problems installing the APK files, others do. If you have a problem let me know and I'll try to figure it out.

IMPORTANT:

You will need to unzip the file,

copy and paste the file in the ROUTE folder of the sim,

Open the Activities folder and double click on the three apk files to install the activities. This will install the consist, path, services, and traffic files. They are required to be there for the route to show up in the route selection window of the game.

You will also need to download the required rolling stock to get the activities to work.

If you haven't used the game in a while or are just installing it for the first time you will need to install the game from the two CDs in the box.

You will also have to download and install a few other programs/files, all are free but without them you will get errors.

1 Goto the following and scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find three downloads. You'll need the first to get the game to work, the third for North American equipment to work. The second is optional if you think you might want to use British Rail routes and equipment.

http://msts.steam4me.net/MSTS_Updates/i ... #downloads

2 Goto the following and get BIN, this will improve a few things in the general operation of trains and also allow you to switch cabs in some activities, version 1.7 or higher.

http://mstsbin.uktrainsim.com/eng/eng.html

3 Goto the following and enter newroads.zip in the file name search,

http://www.trainsim.com/file.php?cm=SEARCH

4 Go back to the same search engine at Trainsim.com and enter xtracks.zip in the file name search.

That should about do it.

Paul

[engineeral]

I know you were looking for more detailed info on the DAR route, for example between Windsor and Hantsport. You might consider this Province of Nova Scotia service:
http://www.gov.ns.ca/geonova/home/produ ... _atlas.asp

You can select to see only railways - and it looks like it shows railways from all time, including the Guysborough Railway which never went into service but did have it's alignment cleared.

If it helps, in Canada, at least in Nova Scotia, railway rights-of-way were generally 99 feet wide. (A surveyor's chain and a half.) This contrasts with the US where rights-of-way were mostly, I believe, 66 feet (one chain) wide. Most common roadways and highways laid out before sometime in the '70s (I think) in Canada are 66 feet wide.

You can also select to see property lines. And everywhere I have looked the rights-of-way still show up, at least for main lines. An example is that most of the right of way of the old alignment to the DAR bridge between Windsor and Falmouth is still visible in the property data.

You can get lats and longs to degrees - minutes - seconds.

You can get elevation contours, but these are only a 25 metre interval, so if you go to Google Earth you can do better once you know where to look. You can enter lats and longs in Google Earth (and Google Maps and Bing Maps) to go to a location.