Letters to and from the Editor

I havnt done much on the Tangara this week, so far (I still have tomorrow as one of my "Weekend" days. I seem to have spent most of my time reading and writing emails or forum posts. Some of that time has also been spent on research, but the model itself hasn't gotten much further. Late nights at work, and familiy commitments saw my free time reduced somewhat.

I was surprised to get so many comments on the last post, and I wanted to respond to some of the points made in them, so that is mainly what this post is about.

It seems that there are indeed a few people checking this site daily, so I will keep that in mind and try to post a couple of times a week, but it wont be as frequent as when I first started.

I had a chance to go through the sounds that I recorded last week for the Tangara model. The sound quality was not as good as I had hoped. Im using a small digital recorder, and it apparently has a cheap microphone, with no option to plug an external one into it. Some of the recordings were reasonable, and Im hoping to clean them up using software later. I'll keep trying whenever Im out and about, and Im fairly sure that I will come up with something workable by the time the model is ready for it.

Not having owned any older versions of Trainz, I cant compare, but there are indeed a lot of features in the latest version for content creators to take advantage of. Most of them have been around for a while and are documented in the TRS2004 Content Creators Guide, but I have found, in my experience that many content creatirs dont take advantage of them. I plan to push the envelope, and use as much as I can. Im always really impressed when I see an item that fully exploits the available features, and Im sure you would be too. Dreddman's QR Watertank is one that recently caught my eye, and it is a good example of what you can achieve with a little extra effort. Be sure to see the final picture on page 3 of that post. Its on the DLS by now.

I actually came across the Melbourne 4D train a few weeks back, while looking for some Tangara specs, and did a little more research on it. It certainly provoked a bit of interest, as I found many old posts about it archived from the aus.rail newsgroups, and even a couple of pictures. Given its similarity to a Tangara G set (on the outside anyway, minus the access panels) I was going to do a standard gauge version of the 4D as bonus. Oh well, I guess thats out of the bag now :)

Ive been talking on the Trainz forums recently about the four 86 Class locos that are currently parked at Eveleigh, so I thought the above picture would be good for this post. It shows 8601, 8609, 8622 and 8644 parked in the siding between the Australian Technology Park buildings (Former Eveleigh workshops) and the Eveleigh end of the Redfern Dive (The track on the right). They're not coupled into a consist, just parked close to one another. I noticed that Google Earth shows three of them (unless I mis-counted), so they have been there a while. I guess 8644 came along later.

These passed to Pacific National when it bought Freight Corp, and were then sold to Silverton in 2003, when Pacific National got rid of its remaining electric fleet, reportedly due to higher electricity charges from the newly formed Rail Infrastructure Corp. Alas there are now no electric locos running in NSW, and these four are presumably awaiting their fate, at the young age of only around 21 Years - about half the working life of the 46 Class electric fleet. Cityrail leased these four back from Silverton for work on the Bondi Turnback. Using electric locos in the tunnels removes the problems of desiel exhaust in the confined space. I bet they wished that they'd kept a few, when they realised that! Once the turnback was completed, having no use for them, and rather than take them all the way back to Broken Hill, Silverton parked them here, where they sit idle, except for a few odd jobs such as special tours.

Cut down in thier prime, like the 85 class before them.