Frogging

If Trainz has one very noticeable defect, it's that it is far harder than it should be to include accurate trackwork in a route. Although by and large Trainz makes developing trackwork very easy (trackwork is normally laid using splines and Surveyor automatically creates junctions when track splines meet), it does not include support for animated junctions "out of the box".

Here's an example of basic spline based points:



Although solutions exist, they are version dependent, require scripting and are often quite fiddly to set up. For example, andi06's excellent "Junction Kit" requires that "invisible track" be used to wire up each junction. If that isn't offputting enough, the scripts it uses are (apparently) broken in TRS2009 (the latest version of Trainz). The bottom line is that this really needs to be built into the game engine itself.

Hence it shouldn't be a surprise that quite early on I decided to pass on the junction kit, and just "get used" to the default behaviour. Annoying, but not fatal by any means.

However, this week I discovered a really simple way of making things look just a little more prototypical, albeit without animated junctions themselves. Here's the end result:



The only change here is the use of a pair of additional objects by Frank_Dean for each point, implemented as track objects (so they slide along the rails and take the same height as the track itself). The objects I've used here in this particular crossover are:

• Turnoutfrog-2gray-left-SG


• Turnoutfrog-2gray-right-SG


• Turnoutfrog-3brown-left-SG


• Turnoutfrog-3brown-right-SG

Finally, here's the same view as the first screenshot, with the modified trackwork.



Not a huge change, but a noticeable one.