TransDEM Forum

I've noticed on some people's WIP routes over on the Auran forums that when they are posting screenshots, their surveyor maps have all sorts of different colored vector lines drawn all over the place. Since I'm relatively new to TransDEM, I've searched high and low for any information about these lines and have come up empty handed.

I know that when drawing poly-line routes in the simple route editor, the lines are an aquamarine-type of blue and these are used for showing the route's tracks. But what about other vector lines? I've seen red, pink, black, etc in others' photos.

I guess the main question is, how would I go about placing or getting vector lines for say, streets, freeways, etc? I think something like this would be useful to someone like me who plans lots of metropolitan, city-like routes. There are some maps where I'd like to draw vector lines for entire freeway networks or neighborhoods for reference sake since I don't utilize UTM tiles on my routes, and the raster maps are blurred at eye level.

Apologies in advance if this has been covered elsewhere or is a newbie type question. I'm just trying to get the most out of this awesome program!

-A

Those creations with the red, blue and black lines on default grey terrain were built with the MicroDEM/HOG/TIGER approach, most of them in the early days of Trainz, before TransDEM was around. With HOG, all geo data processing was left to MicroDEM. HOG concentrated on converting plain bitmap images to a Trainz ground file structure. The only suitable map that MicroDEM could combine with DEM data was the US census TIGER data set which happened to be a vector map and MicroDEM happened to have a renderer for this that produced the very colours you see in the HOG-generated routes.

The disadvantage was that TIGER scale is only 1:160,000, a bit on the low side. It may not have been that important 10 years ago because the DEMs weren't very detailed either, partly due to the heavy smoothing applied by HOG to prevent terracing. Nevertheless, you will still be able to find several places in those route templates where rivers are flowing uphill.

I thought about providing direct support for TIGER at a time but abandoned that idea soon after because of the low accuracy of the TIGER vectors. Imagine that your excellent 1/3 or 1/9 arc sec NED DEM shapes the earthworks, your cuttings and embankments/high fills, and the railroad track is placed hundreds of feet off, running straight over the hill crest. It wouldn't be that much fun.

Generally, vector data processed by TransDEM will end up as Trainz splines. Good vector data for the US can be downloaded from the Open Street Map database but needs conversion to become compatible with TransDEM. I recommend JOSM for this purpose, see Open Street Map Vector Data in TransDEM with JOSM.

Thanks Roland!

-A