Rather ancient carriages I have made, looking for critiques

[TrabantDeLuxe]

Added go-fast rocks:


And a place to turn them in to heat. Now I've been told by a guy who works on a heritage line here that the colour of the fire gives some feedback to the fireman, so I've managed to use trickery to dynamically change the colour of the fire.


A bit cool...


...and a bit warmer. As of now, I've got no idea how to actually script this and make it playable, but we'll see. I've got some ideas.


Here's how it's done: We've got the firebox, a fire texture (using frames), and a gradient on a cylinder acting as a colour lens. The cylinder rotates to set the colour, and using the script I can set the desired rotation. Both have AddATex shaders applied. This might not work for all engines, as the cylinder needs to remain hidden inside the boiler/firebox model for obvious reasons.

[DominusEdwardius]

Rather interestingly, Ben Jervis on his black five did something virtually identical the other day
Edward

[TrabantDeLuxe]

Every time I think I'm being clever, someone else hase been clever before.

[AndiS]

I'm not going to tell you for how many decades this keeps happening to me for fear of showing my age.

Mr. Tolkien told us long ago that we all are just subcreators, rearranging pieces of Creation. According to him, we would be subsubcreators making the best of the very somewhat limited subcreation that is RW. So the probability that independent solutions converge in this little solution space is not small.

On a totally different note, as the guy who came up with a working implementation of the only known method to make signals look less than dumb exactly when the successor of the product concerned was announced, I find it very comforting that other people come up right now with means to overcome other limitations, while others are already chewing their fingernails over the pending release of the next sandbox for us subsubcreators.

[TrabantDeLuxe]

Older style, narrow cab. I didn't have any proper reference pictures, so a lot of what you see is made up from a side view, and pictures of SS326 in the Utrecht museum. The ergonomics on this thing are abysmal.

I don't particularly like the boiler front - it seems a bit boring compared to the rest of the cab. Any suggestions to spice it up a bit?

[AndiS]

You simply did not give the boiler front as much weathering as the cab. Now don't ask me how it would look like with some wear. This is where the real gaps exist: Museum stuff (even life museums aka preserved railways) don't help as they use their engines too little and clean them too often. And period photos are rarely well exposed inside the cab. So you have to guess based on other sources. I love the current trend of going to "lost places" as it floods the net with inside views of industrial ruins that you would never visit. It takes a perspective that you do not get otherwise. Surely many shots are overdone HDR-wise and grime that was left untouched for decades does not look exactly like it did before the shop closed. But still you get an idea how a valve, a handle, a boiler front, a cog wheel might have looked like when it was still in industrial use.

[Rockdoc2174]

I have no idea how things worked in the Netherlands but in Britain it was common up to the 1920s or even a bit later for top-link engines to be allocated to a crew, who were responsible for its cleanliness as well as all the operational duties. Yes, there were cleaners who did the basic groundwork but the crews took pride in doing more to make their locos stand out. They might even embellish it, if the company allowed it. I read somewhere that Scottish companies were more lenient about this and crews added things like polished-steel stars to the smokebox behind the locking handles. If this loco is meant to be as it was in its prime then I'd expect to see it in an almost museum-like state. If it's later in its life, when relegated to secondary duties, then that would be a different thing but a front-line engine should be close to immaculate.

Keith

[TrabantDeLuxe]

Rockdoc, I am actually not sure whether drivers and firemen (Masters and students, to use Dutch parlance) where assigned to an engine. Surely, there is an argument to be made for this (Stroudley was a keen proponent of the practice). In folklore you'll definitely hear about drivers being assigned one engine. Standby engines would have multiple crews. It's just that I haven't got any references for the practice. At any rate, engines where kept relatively tidy, but one can definitely see signs of use on others. I have never heard about drivers being permitted to decorate engines. The only customising that would invariably happen was polishing the smokebox door hinges and buffer plates.

Good points regarding appearance Andi! Taking the boiler front as an example, looking at pictures of engines in use, even on heritage railways, they always show heavy wear, low specularity, loads of brown and grey stains. The museum examples are always a lot more cleaner - which is logical when one thinks about it. Same goes for period photographs, if you can find them. Always ask: why did someone lug out a camera, and decide te expose a rather expensive glass plate? This is why photographs of accidents are really good: they show an engine of which you can be sure it's is (was...) in working condition, instead of something that has just been hastily polished for the camera. Or those pictures where everyone and their dog wanted to be in the picture.

Right, because you've read through the ramblings of a madman, here's a picture for you to look at .

Underexposed, completely worthless for any sort of research... Original!

And the cab, still sort of WIP while I adjust the levels a bit - it looked better in Max:

[Rockdoc2174]

Rockdoc, I am actually not sure whether drivers and firemen (Masters and students, to use Dutch parlance) where assigned to an engine. Surely, there is an argument to be made for this (Stroudley was a keen proponent of the practice).

The argument for is basically that a dedicated crew will take more pride in an engine than if they were allocated an engine every day. You'd expect faults to be reported earlier and for rivalries to develop between crews so that they would try to outdo each other. The counter-argument is availability. If a driver has a day off then the loco is out of service. The fault argument migfht sound trite but, 40 years ago, my job took me out on site for several days at a time on average about once a month. I didn't qualify for a company car so had to have one from the pool, all of which were high-mileage cars but they were maintained well by the company's mechanics. A major row developed between my department and the pool admin because we reported far more faults than any other department did btu the difference was, what could be stood for a couple of hours became excruciating over several days. We once had a Ford Capri and every window rattled all the time. It drove us mad for the week we had it, as you'd expect, but nobody else had said anything. I'm sure the same would be true of a common-user loco system.

In folklore you'll definitely hear about drivers being assigned one engine. Standby engines would have multiple crews. It's just that I haven't got any references for the practice. At any rate, engines where kept relatively tidy, but one can definitely see signs of use on others. I have never heard about drivers being permitted to decorate engines. The only customising that would invariably happen was polishing the smokebox door hinges and buffer plates.

I'd say that the two photos are not contemporary so wouldn't be directly comparable. The well-kept one seems to have been someone's baby and, perhaps, was fairly new at the time. The other photo shows a work-stained engine and I'd tend to think that she's either past her prime and is just another loco or, perhaps less likely, is waiting to go to the works for an overhaul. Decoration was unusual in Britain, too, though I've read that some drivers painted the inside of their cabs in their own way and the driver and fireman's names were sometimes signwritten on the roof-sheet. ISTR at least one of the locos at the NRM has names in the cab.

Keith

[TrabantDeLuxe]

From the limited knowledge I have about these engines - the clean SS360 is certainly a 'later' example. The cab has been modified and the smokebox door has been changed. The smokebox door is a pretty standard Beyer-Peacock affair that came into vogue after 1900. I see no pre-heater, so that dates the picture to before 1917-ish. The scruffy SS805 is photographed between 1899 - 1905 per the description, the absence of a revision date near the buffer beam supports that claim. It could be on the other side though, I don't know whether these dates would have been painted on either side. SS306 does show revision dates, but sadly, they are illegible.

I fully get the point about 1 loco, 1 crew. Obviously, more modern working hours would put an end to this practice. About drivers being posessive of their locos, I recall (again, no sources so it might just be railway folklore) the story about a caledonian driver who would take the regulator key home with him! And yes, Gladstone has the drivers' name in the cab, together with the yearly mileage. William Love, IIRC.