Beginners Guide Part6a

Tutorial 6. Adding Terrain

Open the layout from Beginners Guide Part5 and save it with a new name.

Scale things up a bit

I’m getting a bit fed up with the unrealistically sharp curves (about 20m radius in my version) and short distances between signals of this layout. Fortunately, it’s very easy to change this in Rail3D, using Shift Layout. If we scale the layout up by a factor of four, we should get something that looks a bit more sensible.

Select Shift Layout from the Tools menu. Enter 4 in the scale-factor boxes for x and y, leaving the other parameters unchanged.

Click on ok, and follow the instructions in the next dialogue box.

When you reopen the layout, you will notice that the track spacing in the loop is now rather wide, having been scaled up with everything else.

To fix this we need to use Edit Mode. Click on the Edit Icon in the track toolbar

When the cursor is over a node, you will see that it now changes into a circle and crosshairs to indicate that we are in edit mode.

Wait until there is no train in the loop, then select one of the nodes in the loop track, and drag it towards the corresponding node on the main line. You will notice how it snaps to the correct track spacing.

You could also correct the node spacing using Track Setting

Repeat for the other nodes in the loop.

import