Hello Railroaders!

Progress continues on our Maintenance of Way (MoW) update! In our last update we shared a number of items, including that we are reworking track construction milestones to work with the MoW system: MoW trains will build the track and need to be supplied with ties, track, and ballast. Lots and lots of ballast.

Today we'll look at what we've been up to as we continue to work toward releasing MoW on an experimental branch!

Load models are an area that we've been needing to improve upon, and MoW has helped bring that to the forefront during our testing. One of the challenges with load models has been that our system required each car to be configured for each type of load model, which meant that if we were to add tie models to our gondolas, we'd need to do that for each gondola. New track load model? Update the gondolas. Adding a ties load model? Update the gondolas. This quickly becomes rather tedious, particularly if we need to make changes later, and it's also not modding-friendly in that it requires modifying the cars to add new load models, creating conflicts. We needed a better system.

The solution we've built enables us to define a "load volume" within rolling stock. The load volume describes the available space for the load within that car. Railroader can then find an appropriate load model at runtime and put it in place. This makes it possible to provide varying models for the same loads, without needing to configure each car for each possible load model.

Here are some of the MoW load models:

Not all loads can simply sit in a gondola though. Break bulk loads like dimensional lumber are often sent by flat car, with stakes securing the load. If the load isn't specific to the car, how can we include stakes? After all, the stakes are specific to the car, placed in the pockets along the side.

To address this we've created a way to toggle detail models on cars depending on certain properties of the car, including whether the load model calls for stakes.

There are certainly much simpler ways to build these things that would have been faster to build, but we think they're worth the investment now to make Railroader more flexible in the future.

On the topic of loads – now that we have better volume information, Railroader now takes density into consideration when determining how many pounds of a load are in a car. No more 50T boxcars of dimensional lumber – it isn't desert ironwood!

We've created a new MoW car for your forthcoming maintenance needs. Like all good MoW equipment it's repurposed – this one from a box car. We really like how it turned out.

Gondolas are now purchasable, and a very basic MoW train is part of new Company mode games.

Speaking of new equipment, we're adding an ore car for the Alarka Copper Co. mines!

Perhaps you've noticed above: we've revamped our rolling stock to include more prototypical car data, as well as the reporting mark and number!

In our last post we mentioned what a ridiculous number of cars of ballast it would take to build 13 miles of railroad (1,429, in real life). We heard from a number of you who were very much up for the challenge, so we've added in a setting for construction realism. We're also including a lower realism setting.

We're aiming to find a good location for an on-line ballast producer, or perhaps other MoW loads. This would make for a fun alternative to running all of those cars through the interchange.

On a related note, we've made a key enhancement to how construction works. Previously, the MoW "crew" would use the cars as storage, working from it as they go. Now, they gradually unload the car while construction continues. This frees up your cars more quickly to get them filled back up again.

This has been a challenging update cycle – a lot is changing, and we are still working on significant adjustments. Nevertheless, we are confident that these changes are necessary and important for the future of Railroader.

Thank you for reading! We know that many of you are eager to take the new MoW features for a spin. We're working hard on it and plan to put it up on an experimental branch as soon as it's ready!