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Tip: More realistic railroad tracks

Messages
608
Country
germany
Recently I had to add railway tracks close to an airport border and decided that the standard vectorline doesn't look real at all.
Obviously Aces had provided us with railway lines in order to give a highly visible guidance in areas where no other features might give us sufficient orientation. It might had been even an simple mismatch between units. Before telling you anything more, please backup the file "Terrain.cfg" in your FS root folder first! It's a good idea anyway as some add-ons tend change this file while being installed.

As the width of textured vectorlines, like railway tracks can't be changed via configuration elsewhere (as far as I know) you need to edit the above mentioned file (a good text editor, like 'notepad++' would be your friend). Search the keyword "railroad" until you can see the section quoted below and change the last shown line. You'll find likely
Code:
StripWidthMeters=18.3
This is ridicules as the gauge width of a standard railway track is 1435mm (e.g. in most parts of Europe and in the US), 1520mm (Russia and most of it's riparian states), and max.1676mm (e.g in India). As rolling stock might need well more than 3 m in minimum for its structural clearance, I decided to use 4.5 as parameter instead (in reality too much). The section in question now should look like this:
Code:
// Misc vector types - railroad
[Texture.200]
Name=Railroad
Color=FF404000
guid={DDE116BF-0E97-4EB6-A9EC-7EF93D9F2D0E}
LegacyId=1210
Textures=railroadsu.bmp
Layout=3_PLUS_4
StripWidthMeters=4.5
Actually, the result looks much better!

A few last words: The tip fits for standard sceneries of FSX/FSXA only. It can work for its derivates as well and likely for FS9, too. However, some add-ons, like UTX, and probably others too, may bring their own entries to TERRAIN.CFG additionally or they might even replace the whole file. In such cases I wouldn't edit anything but an unchanged standard entry (as quoted above). Please ignore anything else, as the result might be a total mess finally.
 
Last edited:
Messages
223
Country
us-idaho
Thanks for the tip, Axel. I made the change in the FSX terrain.cfg file after creating a backup. I'll be sure and check it out tomorrow. My first flight of the day will have me departing directly over a rail line so I'll be sure to look.

I looked at my FS9 installation and can find no mention of a strip width for railroads in either the FS9 config or the terrain config. Lots of entries for railroad bridges, but not just railroads and a search of the phrase "strip" or "stripwidth" fails to find any mention of it, so I'm thinking this won't work in FS9.

Randy
 

scruffyduck

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Messages
34,853
Country
unitedkingdom
Thanks for posting this Axel.
 
Messages
608
Country
germany
I looked at my FS9 installation and can find no mention of a strip width for railroads in either the FS9 config or the terrain config. Lots of entries for railroad bridges, but not just railroads and a search of the phrase "strip" or "stripwidth" fails to find any mention of it, so I'm thinking this won't work in FS9.
Thanks for the hint Randy. Unfortunately I can't check it myself as I don't have FS9 installed anymore. I've changed the tip until anybody else can probably offer a solution.
 
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