Third-party route & stock - MS Train Sim

[bhk]

The route is freeware and is known as the Rocky Mt. 4th. Division of the Milwaukee Road and this Division ran from Avery, Idaho to Alberton, Montana.

The full electrified section of the Milwaukee Road covered four divisions; Avery to Alberton, Alberton to Deer Lodge, Deer Lodge to Three Forks and Three Forks to Harlowton.

Three of the four divisions are available as freeware routes for Train Simulator - the only one not yet created is Div.3, Deer Lodge to Alberton.

Also available as freeware are all the electric locomotives that saw duty on the electrified divisions, including the EF-2's, EF-3's, EF-4's and EF-5's. The EF-4 was the "Little Joe".

The following two screenshots were taken on the Avery to Alberton section, arguably the most scenic piece of railroad in North America in its day.
I am creating an Activity (which will probably take forever to finish! ) that has the player's train moving from Avery to Alberton and encountering normal traffic en-route.

These shots show the train approaching the St. Paul's Pass tunnel near Roland.





What I sometimes do is to run Google Maps or Google Earth on the laptop so that I can check my progress and location as I'm operating a train on the desktop PC.

These 3 shots show the Google Maps map view, the same location in the satellite view of Google Maps, and an oblique view of the same spot in Google Earth.






Compare the last one with the high shot of the train and i'm sure you'll agree that the terrain is a pretty close match.

Incidentally, the sounds for these electrics are excellent.
Someone has gone to a lot of trouble, as I have the Pentrex DVD of the Milwaukee Road through this area and cannot tell the difference (for the external loco sounds) between the real world and the simulation.

UPDATE:
A shot, whilst testing, of a meet between my train and an AI unit that I had programmed into the Activity.


Bruce

Bruce

[bruzee]

Thanks for sharing this Bruce. These will be my first addons for MSTS.

When I was attending the U o Montana in the late 1940's I sometimes caught the Olympian in Butte on Sunday afternoons im order to be in Missoula for classes on Monday. I now just live two blocks from this depot which now houses KXLF television. This depot had a roof over the boarding platform which I thought was great. Neither the UP or the NP depots had one.

Now its off to find the addons. Bruzee

[bhk]

Bruzee,
Here's a list of the file names on www.train-sim.com
You will need to register a name and password before you can access the files.

Div 4, Alberton - Avery:
mlwrm421.zip through mlwrm428.zip .........8 files in total
mlwrm4fx.zip ...... a fix for some textures
mlwrd4ph.zip...... another minor fix

Div 2, Three Forks to Deer Lodge:
mlwrmd2a.zip through mlwrmd2k.zip ......... 11 files in total
mlw2crtd.zip .......... a revised installme.bat file
rmd2ptc2.zip ......... a fixed texture file
rmd2snow.zip ....... another fixed texture file

Div 1, Harlowton to Three Forks:
rmd1_v2a.zip through rmd1_v2k.zip ....... 11 files in total
milwfix1.zip ..... some minor fixes

A word of caution:
Because of their size, all the route files in each group are "spanned" so that when decompressed they merge into one large file - for each Division, that is.
You will need to have WinZip v8.1 (or better) to unzip them.

For the electric locomotives and many items of rolling stock, you can narrow the search by simply inserting Lukas Lusser into the search field.

Have fun.

Bruce

[kbr]

I've been meaning to get that route since you told me about it, Bruce, but haven't been able to get onto Train-Sim since the holiday season started. Looks good, I'll be grabbing it as soon as traffic dies back down at Train-Sim.

[bhk]

It's a wonderful route between Avery and St. Regis and must have been spectacular back in its hey-day.
What a dead shame to gaze down from the GE satellite and see nothing but mile upon mile of abandoned right-of-way, where even the tracks and sleepers (ties) are gone.
There was something really wonderful (to me!) about American railroading in the 40's, 50's and 60's. Such a huge variety of road-names, loco types, liveries.......great stuff for the nostalgic in me.

Bruce

[bruzee]

Bruce:
Thanks for the guidance. I have all the downloads. I don't have MSTS yet because the stores in Butte were out of stock and I had to order it over the internet. Am looking forward to getting it up and running. Thanks again. Bruzee

[bhk]

Bruzee,
If you have any dramas when getting the stuff installed, let me know here.
I'll do what I can to assist by remote control!

Bruce

[bruzee]

Bruce

Thanks for the offer and I will do that but I'm a pretty stubborn individual and won't bother you unless I'm at the end of my rope. I must say though that I have the feeling I'm going to need some help. It was nice of you to offer. Bruzee

[bhk]

bruzee said:

.... I must say though that I have the feeling I'm going to need some help. It was nice of you to offer. Bruzee

I know for a fact that there is a problem with the naming of the spanned zips in one of those packs, Bruzee.

I've just checked the train-sim.com forum files and it is to do with RMD4.
A couple of the files were named incorrectly when the zip was created.
Here's the link to the article:-
forums.flightsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?t=265588&highlight=milwaukee+road+rmd

I know that once I corrected the file-names, all was okay with the unpacking.

But don't hesitate to give a yell here if you need a hand.

Regards,
Bruce

[kbr]

Bruce,

I finished downloading all the files and am currently trying to install Div1 and noticed that the installme.bat file is failing to work right. It uses the old Xcopy command which I don't think works with Windows XP and was wondering if you knew of an update for the installme batch file?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Kevin

edit: I fixed the problem. It seems to be a path problem as I found a copy of Xcopy.exe in the Windows\system32 folder. I copied this to the route folder and ran the installme.bat and it worked this time.

Now that I know what the problem was, I should be able to finish installing the files.

[kbr]

Got Div1 & 2 working. Did a little test run it Div 2 and the route looks very nice. It's looks authentic and the Highways and freeways look like they should. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.

Div. 4 is crashing the sim so I'm going to have another shot at installing that one tomorrow. I may have messed up somewhere.

Thanks for the info on the routes, Bruce.

[bruzee]

Bruce:

Uncle!! I have RMD1 and RMD2 unpacked and waitig to be installed as soon as MSFS arrives but I'll be darned if I can figure out why RMD4 won't unpack. I have WINzip 11.1 (brand new download). Maybe it's my poor vision but I have read over that forum you sent many times and I cannot find the answer. Need a little nelp please! Thanks a bundle. Bruzee

Incidentally, I lilke the word "whilst". You never hear it used in the US.

[kbr]

bruzee said:

Bruce:

Uncle!! I have RMD1 and RMD2 unpacked and waitig to be installed as soon as MSFS arrives but I'll be darned if I can figure out why RMD4 won't unpack. I have WINzip 11.1 (brand new download). Maybe it's my poor vision but I have read over that forum you sent many times and I cannot find the answer. Need a little nelp please! Thanks a bundle. Bruzee

Incidentally, I lilke the word "whilst". You never hear it used in the US.

The files are named wrongly. Try changing the end of the file names like this: change the last part of the name, the '.000' to '.z01', '.001' to '.z02' through the rest.

[bhk]

Bruzee,
Kevin's got the answer and also if you scroll up this thread a little way, you'll find I made mention of this glitch and included a link to a thread about it on the Train-sim.com forum.

Here's the thread again for you. It essentially expands on what Kevin has stated above:-
forums.flightsim.com/vbts/showthread.php?t=265588&highlight=milwaukee+road+rmd

Bruce.

[bhk]

kbr said:

Got Div1 & 2 working. Did a little test run it Div 2 and the route looks very nice. It's looks authentic and the Highways and freeways look like they should. I'm impressed with what I've seen so far.

Div. 4 is crashing the sim so I'm going to have another shot at installing that one tomorrow. .....

Kevin, that's good news on 1 & 2 but sorry to read that Div 4 is being annoying.

It is very likely that the test Activities that Jerry retained when he packed it up are causing the glitch.
What I would suggest is that you go into the Route folder, then the Activities sub-folder, and remove the contents (save them somewhere).
Do the same with the contents of the Paths, Services and Traffic sub-folders.
Then fire it up again, go into Explore mode (if it gets that far) and see how it goes.

Bruce