TransDEM Forum

On a map that I am working on, I am using OS Vector data to show the railway lines and I would like to show roads as well. How can I get the roads provided in the vector data (and in a seperate file) to show up as a different colour from the railway line.

G'day Dean_Forest,

That's extremely easy to do. I presume you know how to 'create' the appropriate polylines for railway lines and to export these to Trainz. In order to create similar polylines for roads, change the colour you are using for the railway line polylines (which is probably the standard default Cyan) to another colour (I would recommend using Red (RGB 255,0,0), which is the colour used by T.I.G.E.R. lines) by using the Options Menu>Settings>Route Tab colour settings and simply 'trace' over the roads you want to have shown on the terrain and export these new lines as a separate "track spline" export using the "create track splines from route vector data" option - you can even specify the appropriate road spline (by it's KUID) that Trainz should use to place 'over' the spline (or instead of it), as you can choose which track KUID to use , if you so desire...

Jerker {:)}

I am not quite sure how that would work, could you explain a bit more?

There are currently two route files (.str) provided by Ordnance Survey, one shows the railway lines and the other shows roads. They both show up as cyan in surveyor. How can I get Transdem to recognise that they are different and to display and export them in different colours.

I can understand what you're wanting to do, and I understand what jerker was trying to explain which are two different things. He was talking about exporting actual splines and you're talking about making colored lines.

Roland may have an answer, but I certainly can't think of a way to make it differentiate between rails and road in the actual step that is creating the actual map texture which is actually the first step. Jerker is talking about the last step when exporting for Trainz.

What I can't understand is why someone would want to try to build a route using just a raster map as a texture with a colored line on it showing the route. Using Google maps, Yahoo maps and exporting them as UTM tiles and then looking at them in wire mesh mode the level of detail is exponentially so much more crisp and clear.

If you prefer raster maps, export those as UTM tiles and they will be so much sharper that you may not
need lines to follow.

I personally gave up having TransDem place the route in the form of a line on my second or third route. It's only really as good as the route file, and it can vary a little in the actual route as compared to a raster. I don't know why it varies, and I really didn't concern myself with it because I use UTM tiles almost exclusively when laying track anymore. It's just far more accurate.

The idea of exporting vector data to Trainz is to convert the polylines to Trainz splines objects. See mrgisa's tutorials #2 and #5 for this.

The cyan ground texture is only a very basic indicator. Due to the limited number of ground texture colours available, to their main purpose of representing the raster map and to the overall limited scale of ground textures, the cyan path is not the preferred approach of using vector data in TransDEM.