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#.