A quick fly around Bishop Auckland

Although I sketched out the basic outline of the routes in TransDEM (which it dutifully exported to Trainz) the real work of trackbuilding is done in Surveyor itself. The first thing to do was lay the main routes into the town (from Shildon, West Auckland, Spennymoor, Hunwick and Etherley) and get the trackwork in the station area roughly into the right form.

Once that was done, I started trying to make the basic routes drivable - which meant getting the gradients roughly right. That's a very iterative process, but once you get the hang of it isn't too difficult (maps often show where cuttings and embankments lie along the route, which gives a pretty useful clue) it . I actually started with the area north of town, as I figured it would be easier to work out the height of the trackwork from published data on the Newton Cap viaduct which carried the line north towards Durham (it is something like 32m high from ground level).

I have to admit it was quite fun to dump a 31 or 37 at one end of the model and drive around for the first time!

I have actually been working on this for a couple of months now, so it's actually beginning to look fairly good in places. Here's a few pictures showing the area around Bishop Auckland itself:

Bishop Auckland station, viewed from the East. Bare platforms for now, but that will be sorted out in due course!

Platform 4 at Bishop Auckland, looking towards the Weardale/Crook line

Bishop Auckland goods yard

Bondgate looking north towards Newton Cap viaduct and Toronto

Bishop Auckland east junction. The lines to the right lead to West Auckland and Barnard Castle

I've obviously not included all of the screenshots I've taken (there are way too many to do that!), but these and any others I upload can be viewed directly at http://picasaweb.google.com/nosleeptilspennymoor/NoSleepTilSpennymoor#.

Hills and Stuff

Durham is anything but flat, and Bishop Auckland - being on the foothills of the Pennines - is definitely no exception. With that in mind, it was pretty obvious that building a model on a flat board then trying to put the hills in afterwards is really not going to work.

Enter Digital Elevation Mapping (DEM) - a technique for geographically mapping spot heights of terrain - and a tool called TransDEM. When I learnt about this it was obvious that this was the way to go. Although georeferencing of maps etc. is somewhat tedious TransDEM takes much of the gruntwork out of it can (even better!) can export the basemap to Trainz itself as a starting point.

I used modern Ordnance Survey maps as my reference, together with freely available DEM data provided by the Space Shuttle Programme. It's not hugely accurate (30m if I remember correctly), but it's a good start. The first step, however, is to georeference suitable maps to provide an overview of the route:


When the Trainz baseboards are generated, this map will actually be imprinted onto them, which acts as a useful guide while building the route. Here's how it looks with the DEM data overlaid on the map:


Once the export to Trainz is completed, the map will be overlaid on the terrain. Here’s a (very early) version of the area around Newton Cap viaduct in Surveyor, with the underlying map clearly visible:


It is quite hard to get your bearings at first, but helpfully the georeferenced map data is easily visible in the Surveyor map view:


TransDEM can not only create the baseboard terrain, but also the basic trackwork. For detailed mapping, it also allows “UTM Tiles” carrying street maps etc. to be created and positioned in place within the model.

Just to wet your appetite, here’s an early version of the area of Bishop Auckland station itself, with most of the trackwork in place:


Overall, a very useful and interesting tool. :)