Creation Sharing Diary Of Creating A Route - Toronto Subway Opening Day

It seems I've given myself the task of re-creating the T.T.C. Subway, and Gloucester Railway Carriage and Wagon Company "Gloucester" G-1 subway car, as they were on opening day on March 30th, 1954.

Here is where I'll be posting semi-regular updates on my progress and fielding questions, mainly in an effort to free up more room on the forum for other creators' stuff.

To start off with, a view of the tunnel entrance on the south side of Eglinton station, looking north. I Just got my landscape textures functioning today, obviously I still have some tweaking to do. The track has been cobbled together, mostly from a duplicate of one of the Training Centre (sic) Loft descriptions (mostly because I couldn't tease the rails in my own loft description into becoming visible,) but I've supplied my own (well, royalty-free) ballast textures, and changed the gauge to Toronto's rather unique 1,495 mm. The tunnel entrance itself is just a big rectangle (scaled a little too big, I think) with an image texture slapped on it to make a temporary stand-in.

And, though I've not made as much progress on the next front, what with the dayjob and other real-life stuff getting in the way, a look at my progress on the Gloucester: Of course none of this would have been possible without the wonderful PC Editor Forum community, and DTG, finally making good on their promise of an editor!

Watch this space!

 

looking forward to seeing your progress. Its looking good so far

 

Love that

 

Just a brief update. I was off from work today, so I did some lofting. Quite pleased with how it turned out...

 

Just a quick update. Having spent the better part of a day figuring out a Blender-to-PC Editor miscommunication about UV mapping (nothing an extra UV channel couldn't fix,) and in bad need of a break, I thought I'd share my progress on Eglinton Station. Not sure if screen space reflections can be used properly or not, so I'm putting in some reflection captures to help out in either case. No default lights, that's all coming from the emissive material I used for the fluorescent fixtures. The video is in-Editor.

 

My hat is off to you, I hope you manage to turn this into a reality. One of the advantages of simulators is that you can explore things outside of current reality - for example the original interlining plan. From transittoronto.ca:

For the first six months of operation, the BLOOR-DANFORTH subway was integrated with trains on the YONGE-UNIVERSITY line. Every second train departing from Eglinton ran through to St. George station to Keele and then reversed direction to go to Woodbine, or running through Bay station to Woodbine and then reversing direction to go to Keele. This meant that passengers could ride downtown or cross-town from any station on the Bloor-Danforth subway without changing trains, and that passengers on the YONGE-UNIVERSITY line could ride direct to any station on the Bloor-Danforth subway.​

Of course, that would mean you'd need to create the Bloor-Danforth line too. How good are you at viaducts? :P

 

As much fun as that would be, I think the 12 original stations are going to pose enough of a challenge for me! At least with the detail and historical accuracy I'm trying for. I wouldn't dream of stopping you if you were thinking of taking a whack at it!

 

Awesome project !

 

Out of curiosity, what are your plans for the signalling system? I have been thinking about recreating the (legacy relay-based, non-CBTC) signalling system of the NYC subway, including proper operation of things like grade- and station-timed signals. I believe the Toronto subway uses an identical relay-based signalling system, so I'm curious what your plans are for signalling, if you've thought that far ahead yet!

 

I Haven't (quite) started setting up the signalling, but basically yes, it's the same setup, at least in 1954. Automatic fixed-block and interlocking signals all the way. Still researching whether station-timed and grade-timed signals were there from the beginning, though. Common practice at the time was to do a low speed key-by on a red signal at the operator's discretion, but this practice was banned fairly early on. Not sure how I could set that up without requiring a proper call-on!

 

The same is true of key-by in NYC. Well, I'm fairly familiar with the inner workings of NYC's relay interlockings, so feel free to poke me if you need any information on how those work - I can't help so much with anything specific to Toronto, but to the extent that its signalling system is the same as NYC, I may be able to be helpful. I have plenty of information on the standards and design of the circuitry in NYC. Though at the same time, this is probably more low-level than a TSW simulation would get into - it's likely not going to simulate interlockings on the level of individual relays, as the circuit design information I have does. But anyway, my point is: I'm very familiar with NYC's signalling system, and am happy to provide information about NYC's system, if there's anything that would be helpful to you.

 

Life is keeping me busy this weekend, but I made some progress with texturing in Eglinton station. I want to make the 3 levels (platform, mezzanine, and surface) of this station explorable by foot, so I want to get all 3 levels roughed out, to begin with, so I can insure accurate positioning of the tracks. The system basically used 3 platform designs across 12 stations, so working on that before starting laying track made sense from that standpoint, as well. The work-in-progress Gloucester G-1 car is there to check scale, and remind me that Blender UV's don't always play nice with UE4. And there are the limitations of Screen Space Reflections to consider. But I'm tired, so I'm going to let the guy in the fluorescent orange coveralls worry about it for me for now.

 

Another busy weekend, but at least I've managed to get my custom track looking a bit more like the real deal (authentic spacing of the third rail, and of the sleepers helping in that department.) Apart from the clip plate spacing being off, the rail texture being rather plain, and the ballast missing a bumpmap, this is more or less how the track should look. I still think getting the track looking right first is going to save me having to re-do a lot of track laying later. Maybe in a week or two, I'll be able to make a start on Davisville Yard!

 

looks great!

 

No pic of Davisville yard, I'm afraid; I still need to fix a thing or two with my track. (thanks to pierrechi for the tips regarding SuperSleepers, by the way!) Also it turns out switches need blueprints and animation, neither of which have documentation yet AFAIK, so there's a whole new headache to look forward to.

With the holiday season fast approaching, I've started lining up some period-appropriate assets, though I haven't had time to put a TTC-style paint job on the bus I found. Let's call this one "Fun with proxy meshes and placeholder assets." That bit on the bottom, just left of centre is the subway entrance, so this post counts as train-related.

 

There should be automatically a blueprint in the switches. Dtg needs to add that so u don't have a headache

 

I don't know about anybody else, but I find myself making less progress as the holiday season takes hold. It's not necessarily a bad thing; maintaining a proper work/life balance is always important. But in case this is my last post in 2023, I will offer some advice: More detailed research makes for more detailed... details.

 

I also didn't make much progress in the past days even though it's supposed to be easy stuff so I'm glad it's not just me. Some things are just much more important than a train-sim route.

 

Exactly, and this independent of the holiday season also true for the complete year.

I follow up on the above statements, as well. But I guess this is completely fine. This is not a forced task or job, we have to do. It's a freetime project and thus it's completely okay to treat it as such and also let place for other things in your life when having free time.

I think the main goal, is that we keep on working at all, doesn't matter how long the gaps in between might take.

Merry christmas!

 

Christmas progress on Toronto route - YouTube by pwilson79 posted Dec 23, 2023 at 11:24 PM

An early Christmas entry for my creation diary. Eglinton subway entrance interior is fully modelled, apart from ticket booth and signage, just not textured yet. Watch to the end for a special message

 

Well, it's a busy time at work, but I have managed to make a little bit of progress.

Please have your fare ready!

As an aside, today I learned that new rails are actually brown and rusty-looking, and that it's the older rails that form "black" rust, and have a more iron-like appearance. I would not have expected that at all!

 

Didn't want anyone to think that I'd been resting on my laurels!

Wanting to build out the area around Eglinton station, I went and shelled out some cash for a UE4 asset pack that lets you build roads from splines, and has "simple vehicle traffic." When I tried migrating the blueprint spline system from an Unreal Engine project into the editor, the blueprints have compiling errors in the construction scripts. (I'm not entirely shocked.)

I've had no luck with getting traffic to move, but I've managed to get a bit of a return on my investment by exporting my TSW Editor landscape tile, as a static mesh, into a blank Unreal Editor project with the road system content, using that to build some roads against, and then converting the resultant blueprint spline road into a static mesh and exporting that back into the TSW editor.

I do hope DTG will consider better native support for this sort of thing in the next PC Editor version. Oh, and have a look at the exterior of Eglinton Station, too!

 

I wanted to show off the progress I've made for the Intermediate Level proxy mesh of Eglinton Station. I'll get to the gaps around the doorways soon. Next I'll probably cut some appropriate holes in the floor and drag the platform level under there. Then I'll know where to put the tracks!
(I'll worry about stairs and escalators later.)
video should appear below:

jan 20, 2024 diary - YouTube by pwilson79 posted Jan 21, 2024 at 1:17 AM

 

Nothing too exciting to report on this week, but I thought I'd show you what I've got so far for Eglinton's bus concourse. Please ignore the ceiling.

The bays had this odd raked arrangement, but I found making a custom transform orientation in Blender (I named mine Jerry) really helped with lining up the passageways. Do you guys all know the Blender trick for aligning a vertex to another by snapping the 3D cursor to the target vertex, pressing period to select the 3D cursor as the centre for transformations, then selecting the vertex you want to move, and scaling it to 0 along the desired axis? Because it's a good trick; also it comes in handy if you save after moving some geometry you didn't mean to!

Have a good week everybody!

 

Got my road splines system with basic AI traffic working, much to my astonishment. Here's a lovely swarm of Hornets! (Don't worry, the subway passengers will have several other period-accurate vehicles to watch, not where this video is at, but more south of Davisville, where the road comes down close to the level of the cutting, for those familiar with the route IRL.) No accompanying sounds... yet.

A Swarm of Hornets by pwilson79 posted Feb 10, 2024 at 10:39 PM

 

Wow, that's very cool. I always wondered how one can implement moving traffic vehicles on the road splines. I guess setting up the blueprint for it isn't that easy, right?

 

I've managed to get it working with the TSW built-in system btw. If you need any help we can chat.

 

Thanks for the encouragement! The moving traffic aspect is actually a large part of why I went with a 3rd party Blueprint system.

The way they've set it up, the traffic path is a list in the blueprint actor's properties in the main editor window, that you can populate by clicking on the road splines you want with an eyedropper tool. It's a lot simpler than it sounds. Haven't poked around the blueprint graph more than was needed to fix up the functionality, because it was making my head hurt.

I won't name drop it, but if you search for "spline roads with basic AI traffic" it'll be among the first results. A little pricey I.M.H.O., and a true P.I.T.A. to repair functionality in the Editor, as I've said. But it's late, and I may be catching cold, so with that, I'm off to bed.

 

Ah, yes. I found a few entries (for anyone who's reading this hereafter: "spline roads with basic AI traffic" actually didn't gave me any results but "spline AI traffic" did). Yes, not that cheap. I have no clue yet how difficult it is to do that in the way DTG does it within the Editor, but might be worth it at a later point, since I also got a lot of roads on my routes where this could be helpful.

Any idea how this actually affects performance? Yesterday, I asked someone here in the forum why he had problems with a big city station which not has that much AI traffic. He said it seems to be because of the signals and assets(?!?). I have a motorway crossing over my route and would like to populate it, but I guess TSW would crash instantly then...

Placing stationary car static meshes is not a good solution, but I guess better than having a complete blank motorway.

 

Yes, this would be cool, but you also could create a tutorial about that for us all . I'm not at the stage yet, where this becomes relevant and so maybe it would be better to have it in a video to rewatch at any time (also because I probably would not understand it at the first try).

 

Sorry for not replying sooner! The performance hit really ought to be negligible, maybe it was AI *rail* traffic the other person was talking about? In any case, working out how TSW4 does its moving road traffic would have been far easier, to the point where I wouldn't reccomend trying to adapt anything 3rd party unless you've had prior experience programming and debugging in blueprints. It is future proofed if DTG should decide to re-jigger how their own setup works in the future, I suppose.

 

Cool!

 

Signals are almost identical to MTA with the exception of the flashing red grade timing aspect which came about after the Russel Hill incident.

 

Interesting question.
I suppose if they had GT signals from the beginning, they'd have to change the timings when the M1s came because of how slow the G's were.

 

Today was a "materials and textures" day, among other things, but I'm not sure how much else I'll get done this weekend. Here is a look at my base grass texture (done, I think) and the repaint job on the GM "old-look" bus so far. I also think it happens to make a nice desktop background.

 

Spent most of the weekend working out that the bump offset node in materials won't work in a skeletal mesh. This appears to be a built-in limitation of the engine. I had trouble even importing normals from blender for a skeletal mesh, but I got there in the end.

Which is not to say I didn't achieve anything; Behold! The Slowly-Rotating Dodecagonal Prism of Progress!™ :

 

This weekend was spent firstly by switching over to the native vehicle and road system (with a moderate degree of success,) and secondly, by practising my track-laying technique, now that my track is most of the way to looking how I want. Even if I do end up having to re-lay a lot of what I have so far, at least I feel my skills will be up to the task, and this way I will be able to test out trains sooner rather than later.

As a side note, it's a little humbling to finally be at the point where I can save time by selecting my Place Markers, rather than flying around the map! Fast travel, baby!

 

Just a couple of things I want to say.

First of all, there is no possibility of my finishing the route in time for the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Toronto subway, on the 30th of this month. I anticipate about a year or so until it's ready for release, which will be for free, as I've stated before. (I am only able to work on it in my spare time, after all!)

Which brings me to my second point. I've mulled it over, and I've decided it's best to let the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) know about the route before I release it, and to only release a "de-branded," but otherwise identical version of it, should that be what they request. It would sadden me greatly, should I have to do so, but I suppose asking them is the more honest thing to do, and at least there's nothing preventing me from making the full version for myself.

I'll probably tell them this weekend, when I'm not building out the rest of Davisville Yard, or optimizing the mesh on the roof of the GCRW "Gloucester" G-1. I'll let you know how it all goes!

 

Okay, so I just rattled off an email to the TTC. Here's what I said, If you're curious (typos included):

I hope it struck the right tone. Anyway, some progress shots to wrap up the weekend:

 

Why do who need to email ttc

 

mostly because I'd like to use the TTC logo in the final plugin, if they're cool with it.

 

If it's free I don't believe you have to ask permission to use

 

I'm 99% sure you're right, but I'm no legal expert, and it's that 1% I was worried about.

 

Do you know if cftc asked permission to use via rail/go trains livery

 

You can publish a supplementary branding patch like AP does.

 

I don't know. I don't believe he mentioned it, if he did.

 

AP are almost certainly breaking the law by doing this.

 

No they're not.

The branding patches are separate free downloads.

You can't use logos without permission for profit.

 

For starters, you can infringe trademarks even if you aren't making a profit. Second, any lawyer arguing that making the branding patches separate downloads did not protect AP would have a slam-dunk case. There is no real means of arguing that AP does not financially benefit from the existence of the branding patches.

The only real defence AP would have would be that the inclusion of trademarks was necessary to produce an accurate model. Unfortunately the fact that they also distribute unbranded versions harms that argument.

 

Hey folks! Hope you're all doing well.
Wow, this whole debate really developed some legs of its' own, eh?

As it happens, I'm home today fending off a cold, so I have a chance to let you all know that the T.T.C. did in fact get back to me; the upshot is that they want me to send in screenshots of the final product where the logo is displayed, and they've got some pretty light paperwork for me to do at the end, but otherwise they seem completely cool with it!

I was waiting until I had more progress to show, to deliver the good news, but as crummy as I feel I thought I might as well take the opportunity to try to steer this thread back on course to some extent. That said, it is nice working on the route knowing the sword of Damocles isn't hovering over my head. I like to think that one reason we have to worry about this stuff is the growing popularity of Train Simulators amongst the general public.

I'm going to try making proper station platforms next.