Laying the tracks
From the previous thread, we have gathered the resources in the form of maps to start laying the foundation of the city. I will start with railway, as these are the least flexible and therefore it is easiest to building things around the railway rather than vice-versa. I'm going to pull up the map from the previous entry and post it below this paragraph for reference. You can see the railway lines marked by black-white dashed lines. The main line goes from south-east to north-west. This is a quadruple track and it carries both freight and commuter trains. There is also a line that goes directly north from the main line. This is double track and can't be that busy, as there is a road-crossing. The rest are single tracks serving industrial facilities. Indeed, a look on Google Maps indicates there are quite a few spurs leads to industrial sites not on this map. Finally, there is a gigantic rail maintenance depot to the north-east of the city tile. With this in mind, it is obvious to start with the most major track (the SW-NE).
To get a reference point to start work, I will find out the furthest west and east point of the line (where it reaches the city limits). There are 256 tiles across one axis in the map, and my map is 606 pixels wide; therefore there are 0.42 tiles per pixel. Why did I calculate this? Well, I can measure (in pixels) on my map how far down from the top of the map, the railway line is at the boundaries and multiply this by 0.42 to get the distance in tiles and then to plot it on Simcity. The western point is 281 px (119 tiles) down and the eastern point is 87 px (36 tiles) down. I can also deduce the angle of my railway line from this. The difference along the northern axis is 83 tiles across the whole city (256 tiles). Bit of trigonometry and you get an angle of 18°! The fractionally angled railway that comes with NAM is 18.4°; hence the exclamation mark. However, things won't be quite as a easy as plopping one straight line of FARR, as the only FARR interface with road networks is a Maxis road crossing. There are four road-rail interfaces across the main rail line, so it will need to bend into orthogonal at these points. This will render the line slightly off track. But I will intend to start from the west and work my way eastwards. The final road interface will be at the rail maintenance yard, so I don't mind switching it to diagonal before getting back on track at the eastern city boundary.
The next step is to make a note of where the road interfaces occur. Similar to as before, I will measure (in pixels) how far the roads are from the map in Photoshop and then convert this into city tile units to measure across on the map. So far west to east we have Browns Line (49 px, 21 tiles); 30th street (in grey; 189 px, 80 tiles); Kipling Avenue (345 px, 146 tiles); and Islington Avenue (509 px, 215 tiles). I think they are all avenues (two lanes either side), so I will plot them onto the map roughly where I think they will intersect with the railway line and start building a FARR railway line. As I mentioned earlier line uses quadruple track, but I will be using the standard dual track instead. Why? Quadruple track doesn't exist (or at least not yet) and if I were to do two parallel dual tracks, it would be three tiles wide at fractional angles (48 m, compared to the real-life scenario of about 16 m!). Also, the two tracks wouldn't be used by in the game, as I have no way of separating freight and passenger trains.
Next step are the detailed interfaces with road and rail, as they are currently just rail crossing... not ideal for a busy commuter line in one of the largest urban areas in North America! I will work from west to east. The first one is Browns Line and is composed of a an avenue bridge with a very gentle slope from the north and to the south it immediately splits into two one way roads and turns perpendicular with a moderate slope as shown below in Google Maps:
This was mostly successful. I haven't covered the topic yet, but I did have to check the location of Lake Shore Blvd W to see whether I would have room between the bridge to get a nice curved ramp to Browns Line. Unfortunately I couldn't use the NAM curved pieces, but I did move Lake Shore Blvd by one tile so I could get a smoother gradient:
Next up is 30th Street. A rather simpler affair with this one. As shown by Streetview, a simple avenue under rail underpass should do.
Looks like I've hit my file upload limit. I will carry this on as a second journal entry or hopefully as a second post in the entry. Still have Kipling Avenue underpass and Islington Avenue bridge coming up!
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