Eddie, you best open a new thread in the Support section to ask your questions. The authors of the original tutorials may not monitor the forum on a regular basis.
Regarding the TransDEM ground textures, did you have a look at page 11 in the TransDEM Trainz manual? There you'll find the chapter called "Installing the TransDEM Ground Textures". A cdp file is the off-line form of distributing content in Trainz. With Content Manager in TS12 and I think in TS2010 as well you can simply drag the cdp file onto the Trainz Content Manager window and it will install itself. You can also use the Content Manager menu, of course.
TransDEM assigns a texture KUID to each ground vertex, reflecting the colour that comes closest. Though without the TransDEM ground textures installed you will still see the standard grey terrain with the orange grid. You cannot actually paint the terrain in Trainz with a colour brush, you always need to assign a ground texture. The mini-map, on the other hand, is a plain raster image, and that can be drawn by TransDEM directly. The mini-map, hoverer, will be overwritten by Surveyor, once you start editing.
eddieprice wrote:
Another question concerns the route created in TD. Should it be 2D or 3D? and if 3D what are the steps to be taken to create it? I notice that there is a button in TD 'Adopt DEM elevation for polylines'. Should this be depressed while creating the polyline, or depressed after the line has been created?
3D for vector data usually makes sense if the data has a height component in the first place. If you adopt terrain elevations you will get some sort of a pseudo height component. But that's enough to trigger 3D processing. Depending on the spacing of your vector points, TransDEM will cut right through terrain from one point to the next, thus forming cuttings and embankments. They most probably won't be accurate.
The 2D version with terrain elevations checked is usually the option to choose for TS12. But you are free to experiment, of course.