My first, and only, layout. It just keeps growing. As I was putting together the layout, I became increasingly frustrated by the lack of interlocking on the points, and started to delve into the mysteries of TrainzScript. Although not a trained coder (I was a Business Analyst by trade), I managed to muddle through and eventually ended up with the Antshire Scenario
I uploaded it to the Download Station, and was greeted by howls of anguish from people who found the level of detail too much. As they were undoubtedly right I have also produced an Antshire Lite version, not that it is that much better.
I did not produce a TRS2004 version of Antshire. Initially the scenarios ran OK under this version of Trainz as the scenario section of the code did not appear to have changed much from UTC. However this broke when SP4 came out.
There were three problems:
TRS2004 is much less tolerant of errors in third party content. A lot of the content won't display properly without amendments to the config.txt file. I can't recommend TafWeb's excellent TranzObjects too strongly to anybody out there, running TRS 2004 or earlier, who hasn't yet got hold hold of a copy.
The business model in TRS 2004 has gone even further in the road haulage direction (drive to point A choosing your own route, pick up a load, drive to point B controlling the junctions as you go, drop load) rather than British railway practice. There is no concept of signalmen (other than asking the user to sort out the mess), track paths or head codes, as far as I can make out. There is a weigh bill concept, but it does not seem to correspond to any real business process.
As about half the coding effort in Antshire was dedicated to dragging control of the junctions away from the train driver and giving it to (albeit coin tossing) signalmen. This change made any attempt to introduce signalmen into Trainz 2004 even more complex.
From SP4 (or possibly before, I went straight from SP1 to SP4) the consist bar an the bottom of the screen disappeared, rendering the scenarios essentially unusable.
One of the things that annoyed me about the initial release of TRS2004 (though not half as much as the "See it on the map" and other inane comments from the drivers) was the sight of trains bowling along at 60mph with the engine at the rear. I, therefore, nicked the code used used in Antshire at Samington and Port Katherine Harbour South to turn the trains around and put it into a driver rule.
Although I called it a Run Round Rule it didn't really do a run round; it just swapped the engine from one end of the train to the other. As in Antshire, it was not recommended for tender engines or double headers as it only moved the front most vehicle. Furthermore, the bug in UTC which meant that it all went horribly wrong if you where in cab view when the train turned round, still seemed to exist in TRS2004.
The rule is available from the Download Station of from my Downloads Page, but has now been superceded by Auran's much superior Run Round Rule.