I recently purchased the West Highland (South) route from DTG and I’m very happily ensconced in a steam heated Mk1 compartment having an early morning run from Helensburgh to Fort William. One thing I can’t help noticing though, and it’s very obvious with stock that has well-optimised rail joint sounds, is that the interval between each set of ‘clunks’ seems completely wrong for British track which was almost always 60ft rail lengths, or occasionally 45ft. To my ear the WHL(S) has 90-100ft lengths, I assume this is an error with the route - is there any way to change it easily?
Someone else might know about the route but where I go around Lancashire some sections of 45ft track was joined in to 90ft lengths as it removed half of the joints and fishplates. You would have to find a video on the route and see what its like in real life.
I'm surprised this error is perpetuated in such a recent route, I first came across this issue in the Bath-Templecombe route which is quite old now. You may find a setting of 30 for "distance between joints", which is 98.425 feet, which is spot on for your 90-100 feet. For 60 foot rail it should be 18.288. It is a matter of metres vs feet. The figures are stored in the Audio Blueprint files, in Bath-Templecombe they have names like "BT_Standard Ballast.bin", "BT_Tunnel,bin", plus many others for bridges, sidings etc. Each needs to be decompiled, the entry changed, and recompiled. Look for a line in the code that looks like: <DistancebetweenJoints d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="00000040E17A3E40" d:precision="string">30</DistancebetweenJoints> Just change the 30 to 18.288 in each one, don't change anything else. Hope that helps.
I haven’t been over the West Highland lines for a few years but when I did in the mid-90s they were definitely standard 60ft rail lengths. The route is also set in the early 1980s so I’d be surprised if it was different then.
Thank you for this, I’ll have to refresh my knowledge of how to edit Bin files. Much appreciated though!
