Wisconsin & Southern Railroad

[Railfanner87]

Hey y'all. I've been lurking and downloading in the shadows for a quite a bit of time, but recently I've been working on something I can probably share now that there's quite a bit of progress made.

I've been aspiring to map out the entire Wisconsin & Southern Railroad. As is stands though, I'm currently focusing on the starting "Phase". Being the Madison, Waukesha, Fox Lake, Monroe, and Elkhorn subdivision. Hopefully after I can get the current phase fully decorated and what-not. I can move on to expanding outward. Here's some photos of the route:

WSORLayout3.jpg
MononaTerrace.jpg Capture4.png edgebuildings.jpg

[Jdark34]

how many miles is your new route my friend?

[Railfanner87]

It is roughly 210 miles of tracks in its current state

[jbtower]

That's going to be very welcome here, looking good sofar!

[Aiden09]

Very very nice

[Railfanner87]

Progress is slow going, but been getting back into adding more unique buildings to the route. A collection of houses are in the works too, hopefully can get them uploaded to the library once Im satisfied.

image_2026-03-15_125324143.png
image_2026-03-15_125348117.png

[Railfanner87]

Heres a small update showing the night textures of the houses
Houses.jpg

[qballbandit]

Nice job on that night lighting! Wonderful to see varied lighting vs. all white or all yellow in every window

[Railfanner87]

Got a selection of 10 Main Street storefronts modeled to place anywhere, planning to release these once I get the night textures and more rows variants added! Edgerton's depot and a few more unique buildings have been placed around too. Currently still in the process of modeling things like more houses and modern apartment blocks before I really start laying buildings everywhere.

DTEdgerton.jpg

Storefronts.jpg

[Railfanner87]

Took some time to populate Madison with some Campus buildings and some High-Rises. Some other clutter around the city too


UWMad.jpg

Vita.jpg

Hwy14.jpg

[Railfanner87]

Alright, I've come into a bit of a snag. I used Digital Rails' Shape converter to shorten the ScaleRail turntable down to 25m in Blender and got help from Eric to get proper TSections and whatnot added. Problem is, the assembly's texture normals are completely flipped in-game and the animation flips the turntable upside down. The turntable registering the train fully on is offset and only snaps instead of turns. I'm gonna need help wherever I can get with getting this thing to work.

Blender.jpg weird.png weird2.png

[superheatedsteam]

I'm gonna need help wherever I can get with getting this thing to work.

Not all 3ds files are created equal.

Here is what I do after importing a.3ds file:

Often the co-plainer vertices are not welded. Meaning that triangles have their own individual vertices at the same x,y,z location as a triangles next to them, rather than having a single common vertex for the same location in the x, y and z axis. To resolve, select the object, Press 'TAB' to go into edit view, press '1' to go into vertex mode, press 'A' to select all vertices and then press 'M' to bring up the merge tool. Select 'By Distance' and then choose a small distance value. Normally a value of around a millimeter ensures that all co-plainer vertices are welded into one.

blenderMergeDist.jpg

Then with the object in edit mode, press '3' to go into face select mode. Press 'A' to select all the faces. Press 'ALT + N' and select 'Recalculate Outside. This should flip (hopefully) all the normals so that they face 'outside'.

To confirm this go to the 'Viewport Overlays' menu and enable the 'Face Orientation' checkbox. Now when viewing your model in 'Material' or 'Rendered' view, any back facing faces will be red in colour. Find then select these reversed faces in edit mode and use 'ALT + N' then 'Flip' to flip the face so that it is orientated in the correct direction.

blenderFaceOrient.jpg

You can also use the 'Mesh Edit Mode Overlays' tab and select 'Normals' which will project a line from the face normal. You can also adjust the length of the normal to suit the view conditions (it is set to 0.01 in the image below).

blenderNormals.jpg

Once the face normals are correct, you also need to ensure that the transforms for each object are correct. Select each object and ensure that the Rotation: x,y, z are all equal to 0 degrees and the Scale: x,y, z are set to 1.000. If not, use 'CTRL + A' to bring up the transform reset options and reset the Rotation or Scale or Rotation and Scale as appropriate.

blenderRotationScale.jpg

In the above screen shot my Scale is OK at 1.000 for x, y and z, but the Z axis rotation is set to 180 degrees so just resetting Rotaiton is required in this instance but Rotation & Scale could also be used to reset all rotations to 0 degrees.

Ensure the origin point is in the correct locaiton and then apply animations if required and export the model.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Marek.

[Railfanner87]

This method worked out! Thanks a bunch! I'll have to see if this works out for the freeware Danny Beck locomotives Im modifying for the route.

Anywho this might be a file data issue but the turntable registers the locomotive as 'fully on' the bridge halfway (Image below). And when rotating it, its instantaneous instead of actually rotating.

weird3.jpg weird4.jpg

[eric]

I see what the issue is in your rotation.... you only have one linear key. You need 361....

Try replacing your animation with this.

[cfriedri]

If it's any consolation, WSOR operating practice was that the turntable is always "blue flagged" for train service guys and only locomotive mechanics got to play with the roundhouse and turntable. We always grabbed power from the ready tracks and if the motor needed to be turned, we "wyed" it instead.