Respond If You Please

I remember my first snow storm as a very young boy in New York City. I grabbed a sheet of blue construction paper and some colored pencils, sketched a brown tree, and added a thick line of white to both sides of the trunk and the tops and bottoms of the branches to represent the heavy snow. My father was so impressed he took it to the office the next day to show his fellow workers. Responding this way to things we experience is natural and, I think, what lies behind hobbies like model railroading and train simulation.

Historically, people first built models of locomotives, then cars. Soon they placed them on track, electrified the whole affair and launched the hobby of model railroading. Because of size limitations, most model railroaders take liberties with representation of scenery - simplifying, selectively reducing size, compressing distances, and omitting buildings and other features.

With the advent of computerized train simulation we have become able to model scenery more realistically - at least as far as distances and other measurements are concerned. We still tend to omit buildings and features for practical purposes, such as time and effort, and limitations of computing power. Still, we have seen some remarkable simulations, rendering the prototype quite accurately. One of the best examples you could hope to find is Luigi Cartello's Genova Casella Railway modeled in BVE (see the Ocober 2004 issue of Virtual Railroader http://www.virtualrailroader.com/VR-1004.pdf ).

The cab-view drive-it sims, of which BVE is my favorite, have gone further than any when it comes to prototypically accurate representation of routes. One reason may be that since the sim is cab-view only, the route designer can treat 3D objects as stage props, knowing the driver will never see certain views, or views from angles other than those intended. This makes it possible to use photographs applied to flat surfaces to represent three-dimensional reality. If you could see the photograph from all angles, its flatness would become apparent. Full-featured, all-views-possible simulators, such as MSTS and Trainz, have a tougher challenge to meet since with them you CAN see all views.

If you haven't tried BVE, and want to experience the real thing as the engine driver does (at least to the extent possible with a simulation), I suggest you visit Trainsimcentral (http://www.trainsimcentral.co.uk) for all the information you need to get started. Steve Green, the site's owner, is a long-time developer of BVE add-ons. The information and downloads on his site are top notch. Give it a try! You may even get the urge to model your own favorite route in BVE. That's how I got started.

Al