Milepost Bits?

[fchrist16]

Is there any program out there these days that will automatically take a look at a route and create milepost markers at 1 mile spacing for new routes or routes you know the mile markers but don't know exactly where they're at and you can say "mile xx starts here at these coordinates"?

Creating a semi-fictional route and want to automatically place mileposts a bit quicker/easier!

Regards,

-Frank C.

[pwillard]

Wouldn't this be something to request as a TSRE feature? It makes the most sense (to me anyway) that this be something a route editor does.

[fchrist16]

I wasn't sure but figured it would be an OR project as it could be a scenery item.

Regards,

-Frank C.

[landnrailroader]

Well folks, it really makes no sense at all to me - an old retired railroader that likes to play with virtual trains. Why, well, mileposts on the real railroad are rarely a mile apart. So if I am doing a route, it is much better if I can get the track charts for it because on most roads these will have station values (station in this case is a survey term) and you can subtract the lesser one from the higher one and most likely it will be anything but 5280. Ordinarily it will be close but a varience of +- 250 feet is not rare. Any program that would generate them at exactly 5280 ft. intervals would be in error 90% of the time. The only folks that were really concerned about mileposts were the train crews since their $$ usually depended on mileage. If there was a line change, then just about every railroad had their own way of dealing with that. For example when the new line was done on the Clinchfield in Johnson City, TN, there was a loss of about 2 miles, so you see one milepost, and then a few hundred feet later you see another that is 2 miles greater than what you just saw. Such a program would help in Frank's case with a fictional route but I don't do any of those.

Jerry Sullivan (retired from SR and CSX)

[ZachBell4400]

Wouldn't this be something to request as a TSRE feature? It makes the most sense (to me anyway) that this be something a route editor does.

The TSRE ruler might be of great assistance. I'm not exactly sure though if it's used for milepost or speedpost placement.

[ebnertra000]

I use the ruler for mileposts all the time. It's an approximation, but it's close enough for anything I need, fictional or no

[landnrailroader]

I didn't intend for my response to be snarky or what, so I apologize to the original poster. On the cross post, I explained what I have done in these situations when I was doing a real, as opposed to fictional route, but a route that had been abandoned and for which I did not have track charts. This is usually some long abandoned branch line and usually, the zero milepost is near or at, the turnout off the main track. So after getting the track laid, I would set up a activity where a train, usually a light engine, is sitting on that turnout and as it moves along the branch line, MSTS at least had a method for counting out the feet or meters. So when a mile was covered, I would stop and jot down the coordinates of the stop, then proceed to the next mile etc. Not completely accurate but probably close enough. I do not know (yet) if ORTS has this distance measuring capability or not.

Jerry Sullivan

[fchrist16]

I'll have to find the ruler function and check it out! Is it something in the newer (v8?) TSRE tools?

Regards,

-Frank C.

[ebnertra000]

The ruler has been in TSRE Tools almost since the beginning. There are a couple options on it. I se the two-point option because it measures in a straight line. It might take a couple rulers in windy track to get a mile, but it works well enough. Note that the ruler measures in meters, so a mile is 1610m.

On lines that existed after about 1975, the FRA grade crossing database can be used to get milepost locations of road crossings if you have no better data. Even on long-abandoned lines, they tend to be accurate to the hundredth. I organized it by railroad and put it in the library in three parts, IDs 87236-87238

[eric]

Its not probably going to be a TSRE feature to set an actual milepost object, but you could try to use Autoplacement with 1611m as the max placement distance to measure one track mile, and then place the actual milepost object.

Personally, I set them off track charts when I have them, or off of a FRA GIS dataset I came across years ago with approximate lat/long coordinates.

As Jerry mentioned, its not always exactly a mile between, especially as curves get straightened or other small shifts of alignment occur.

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

[fchrist16]

Thanks! I never knew about the ruler function!

Regards,

-Frank C.