Additional Track Items

[Vintage64]

Great job on giving us a simple and clean solution to draft layouts.

I also own 3rd PlanIt and Rail Modeller (OS X). 3rd PlanIt is very powerful but has a steep learning curve. I would not recommend it for early design work. You can spend as many hours in 3rd PlanIt to model your layout as building it in RL. For me that is beside the point. I want a fairly good idea where everything goes and then start building.

Rail Modeller is very similiar to DRail and although it lacks many advanced features of 3rd PlanIt, I found myself using it a lot because it was easy to quickly rearrange layout sections. I hope that DRail will replace Rail Modeller for me so I don't have to switch between OS X and XP all the time.

Here are some topics for the wish list:

It would be nice to have a couple of generic track items in every library:

A) A Dual Track symbol with the approriate track spacing (63.5 mm Fleischmann, 61.6 mm Roco LINE, C-Trak 77.5mm and 64.3 mm and so forth). That way you can run parallel tracks with ease.

B) A portal symbol (dot or circle) to indicate a jump into another level/layer. Hiding tracks is great but can get confusing if you have a complicated shadow level.

Import of some CAD or Illustrator format. Part of the planning is how rail road and buildings work together. Even seeing a basic building outline would help a lot. In my case I am trying to fit Zeche Zollverein (3 parallel tracks plus one siding) into the layout. As I did over in the RM forum, I would suggest to the developer the integration of the native Sketchup format into this program (ignoring the y-axis). It seems to me that Google is rather liberal with developer support. The integration would be invauable if you chose to go 3D in the future.

I'll shut up now - got to take the dog out.

Keep up the good work!

[David]

Good ideas, thanks.

Just an additional question: would a real 'portal' drawing help for suggestion B?
I'm not sure, as it might be confusing if it looks like a tunnel entrance.

Another idea we had was to to draw the tracks in the 'visible range' like it is done now, and optionally draw the rest faintly.
Would that help?

David.

[Vintage64]

Come to think about it, if layers will become available in the near future, forget the portal. The portal works for me in Rail Modeller but it is rather cumbersome and only temporary fix.

I'd rather have better ways of creating or importing(dwg/dxf) bench outlines. So far I have been through about a dozen different layouts and probably more to come. The current method of entering coordinates is rather time consuming.

[changed spelling]

[kimbo]

Don't forget to post those so we can check them out 

[Chris]

Hi David.

You wrote: "Another idea we had was to to draw the tracks in the 'visible range' like it is done now, and optionally draw the rest faintly.
Would that help?"

That sounds a very good idea for my current purposes (one branch line passing over the main line) but I am not sure whether it would be much use for those of us who are going to have layouts with 'fiddle yards' beneath the scenic part of the layout (as I may do later in N scale). So layer drawing would still be essential.

Best wishes,
Chris