Hello everyone, and happy new year to a hopefully better 2021.
Being that the last day of 2020 today, this is my last post of the 2020 year. I have grown alot on the MRR forums since I joined in March of 2020 this year, and hope to accomplish more in the hobby next year in 2021, into this current decade and beyond.
This coming year in May of 2021, it will be the 20th anniversry of when the classic train simulator game, being Microsoft Train Simulator, would have been released in May of 2001 twenty years ago. I first bought the game with my own saved up allowance in the mid-2000s turning my time in middle school.
My favourite route featured ingame was Marias Pass in Montana featuring the BNSF railroad. I developed a facinaton with the BNSF and the Dash 9 locomotive, as I like mountain railroading in North America with the endless pines, forests and mountain scenery. The orange livery on the BNSF dash 9s even reminds me of the orange crush pop soda I enjoy drinking. I intend to get the game again once I get a gaming PC, a I long to play the default version again.
I had the idea of recreating the freight consist In HO or N scale with the same locomotives and freight cars used by BNSF as seen in the default verison of the game which takes place on the Marias pass route set in 2000 and 2001 before the swoosh logo came into use by BNSF. Because of the outdated, crude graphics with some unreadable blurred lettering its hard to make out which kinds of freight cars are which, expecally the boxcars as I cant tell if they are high cubes or not. I would like the help of the BNSF railroad fans and others to help find out the types, lengths, real life railcar manufacturer, etc of the various freight cars featured ingame These screenshots where from the youtuber “Little Pimpf,” gameplay of MSTS 2001 with HD graphics.
Please answer which freight cars typen length etc, in the same order as the scree
Those windows on the caboose weren;t painted over, they were plated over with steel plates. Because by the time the caboose was starting to disappear, hooligans were throwing rocks and even shooting at them. Replacing the old glass with something up to the new standards like Lexan was expensive, so any windows not really needed got plated over instead.
As for running the program - something from 20 years ago that needed a decent video card to play will probably run fine on the integrated graphics, or certainly nothing fancy or even close to high end, today. Back when Crysis came out, not even the most expensive video card on the market could run it a max details and get a good framerate. Today, it’s being dropped as a benchmark because nearly anything can run it well. 20 years is a long time in the computer world.
If you want to run MSTS on a modern machine, like later than Windows XP you should go to trainsim.com and spend time there searching out how to install it so it will run on windows 7 or newer.
Hey Mike thanks. I realize I must reasurch, doing the work myself. I realize its important to ask questions but one needs to do the work themselves and ask when you need be.
Research can be frustrating but it can also be fun, and you could run the danger of knowing far more than you originally wanted too!!
#9. The ETTX reporting mark would indicate that this is a tri level auto rack. I’ve tried to “Blow up” the actual number (752018???) but it became to pixilated.
What I suggest that you do is look closely at the original for the actual number, then go to this site….
Note that you’re talking about finding models of models here essentially, and a few of those (#1, #6, #7) are downright s**ty graphics assets. Why bother.
The container well car isn’t a great design, and the #6 and #7 examples are someone mapped a “texture” image of a different type of car onto a 3-D shape that doesn’t fit properly.
For example, the “MX” is not a valid reporting mark, it’s half a reporting mark and number because the image texture does not visit the 3-D model properly and it’s cut off.
Seriously, don’t try too think too hard about “matching exact models” here, since the simulator just has a few generic models and basic shapes, just “skinned” with different graphics, some better than others.
If you want to essentially run the same train in the simulator and on the model, just kinda roughly match car types and paint jobs. The sim honestly isn’t giving you a huge variety anyway.
Generic and seriously a rather terrible rendition of a well car, and the containers aren’t even graphically positioned properly either, since you can see them over the trucks. The whole point of the well car design is to hold the containers as low to the rails (between the trucks) as possible due to the extreme height of stacked containers. Hard fail.
There are tons of different designs and sizes of well cars available out there in model form.
As others stated, the windows were basically removed/plated over to remove a maintenance item/thing that can get broken on a caboose that’s basically only used as a shoving platform anymore. This is actually a pretty good graphics skin.
Generic tank with low res graphic skin.
The texture graphic looks like an FMC built car. I think LBF made a version of this car, and I think Intermountain has re-released the old LBF model in their “Value” line… at any rate Intermountain has a chip car that will work. Walthers has (or has produced in the past) a chip car that is a Thrall or Gunderson version, and this would work too - pretty sure BN had some of those too.
Also, if you’re really interested in the actual BNSF Marias Pass, and what ran over it, I’d suggest doing your research on YouTube videos of the actual trains at various locations on that line - not what someone putting a scenario together in MSTS thinks was running there. That person MAY have done their own research, or they just threw all the available BN,BNSF, and ATSF assets they could find at it to make a “BNSF manifest freight”…
Depends what your goal is here - representing Marias Pass in model form, or just matching the train you ran in MSTS…
However, I am also getting a sense of a lot of scattered interests from your posts; so perhaps my answer is actually the same thing: just throw a bunch of BNSF cars together. Don’t overthink it, because the MSTS route designer probably didn’t either…
When I got the game I had it installed on our family PC at the time. I am afraid its long gone, along with the physical copy of the game I bought. My current setup is a 2012 Macbook Pro. I understand you can run windows programs on Macbook laptops and desktops via a special program, but that I need to figure out.
Once I get around to building a gaming PC I hope to play the orginal MSTS 2001, and various other train simulator games.
I will do that Chris. I could create two setups, one with what MSTS had, and what the real BNSF freight consists looked like. I would love to learn what the behind the scenes story was when the developers where working on MSTS 2001, and what they thought of it back then.
With the information others have provided, that I will figure that out. I could even create two sets of consists, one matching MSTS and the other in what Marias Pass really looked like.
I am working on figuring out my interests, so its gonna take a while. I apologize if I havent posted any progress on the goals and projects I have posted, as I have alot in my life I need to deal with first before modelling comes first. I dont have space for working on models do I am working on that as of now. For now I just ask questions (googling first, but ask after since google can get too infrmative with too much infrormation to sort out).