Classic Train Simulator Download

[Ariel Wascom]

Beingthat 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 Because of the outdated, crude graphics with some unreadable blurred lettering its hard to make out which kinds of freight cars are which, expecally the boxcars as I cant tell if they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 screenshots I have posted below.

No.#1. BNSF Dash 9 with 48' container length capacity well cars. I love the simplistic look of the blue and pinkish red containers.

No.#2. ICC Burlington Northern Caboose with painted over windows (not sure why). I preordered the version Athearn is releasing in 2021 in their genesis line. I dont plan to paint over the windows.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crappy (it's really bad you guys) custom skin job pasting the photo of probably a Trinity center flow type hopper onto a square body of an older design. No telling from this image what the original 3-D model shape and size was really intended to be.

The photographic skin at least would be from a series of Thrall-built 60' bulkhead flatcars. (Try to use that proper term "bulkhead end" not "bulkend". A "bulkhead" is an actual structural thing. A "bulkend" is not a word.)

BNFE reporting marks was basically "Burlington Northern Fruit Express". They were used pretty exclusively on refrigerator cars. Note the vents/louvers/grills/cut out sections on the sides on one end of the car for the mechanical refrigeration unit.

Pretty much same as #3. Low res skin on generic tank shape. Note that any railroad marked tanks like this are pretty exclusively in internal company service usually for diesel fuel. Due to the extremely speciality of tank cars, railroads did not supply them the shipper. Shippers owned or leased their own cars. (Mostly leased (long or short term) from the major leasing and rental companies like UTLX, GATX, etc.)

Probably a 50' car. Hard to tell from this angle which series they chose to create this skin from, but it's probably one there's not an exact model for. But there are models out there in similar red ATSF colours. (ATSF used these colours on MANY series of cars; basically anything that had a cushioned underframe got the red paint and "Shock Control" lettering.

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"...

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...

cv_acrAlso, 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"...

cv_acrHowever, 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...

After a marathon 4 years of development a project I never thought I would ever finish has finally been published on itch.io. As physics has been used extensively in the simulator I spent many months alpha testing trying to smooth out the hundreds of collisions that can take place, especially if the player makes mistakes driving the steam engine or creates collisions intentionally.

I had plenty of fun creating this simulator that is, our society believes, is the first of its kind globally. Whether it receives any kind of interest from the game playing community is another story. As a hobby project it has fulfilled everything I could wish for in a hobby!

I agonized whether to put a price for downloading this simulator and finally decided I would put it up for 2USD. This is simply based on the fact that, in the real world, our society, whose members can spend many years building beautiful scale replicas of full size steam engines in their workshops, charges the public for train rides to cover the cost of running them as well as track maintenance etc. At our society we charge the equivalent of 0.5USD a ride. With a family of four we charge 2USD so I decided on 2USD for the sim and players can go for train rides forever! I also have maintenance, like having to replace my 4 year old computer I created this sim on as well as helping to pay our societies bills so, regretfully the horrible issue of money forces its way into most things we do!

There are no secrets here that I know of! There seem to be conflicting ways to access the game on itch.io.

This link seems to work: itch.io/mike-thorne. Please let me know if it does not work. Thanks.

Those train sets feel like an anachronism today, probably still out there but seldom seen, like episodes of The Simpsons good enough to reference for comic effect. But their digital progeny live on in the form of train simulators.

The business model for those producing train simulators is not dissimilar from that of a company making those classic train sets. The basic game is limited; but over time, the owner expands it with new track, new stations and new trains.

From the outside, even as a gamer who has wasted shameful amounts of time in shamefully banal games, this still seems kind of odd. The desire to play a simulation rather than something structured more as a game is understandable enough; but given all the options out there what would lure somebody to a train? In search of answers I dug into the new train simulator from Dovetail Games, Train Sim World: CSX Heavy Haul.

The Sand Patch Grade itself has curves and steep gradients and the capacity for some very unpleasant weather. Given that I am used to soft southern commuter trains that are defeated by a light dusting of snow or a particularly determined fallen leaf, this to mw seems like an entirely different world.

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