Beginners Guide Part7

Tutorial 7. Overhead wires (ohle)

Rail3D 2kD allows you to use overhead line equipment (OHLE) in very flexible ways. In this tutorial we are going to use the track options dialogue and the track setting tool to add overhead to an existing layout. Just for fun, we will also convert it to metre-gauge (I said those curves were a bit sharp, didn’t I?).

Track Options

Open the layout from Beginners Guide Part6b

Since we are going to make quite substantial changes, it might be wise to save it under a new name before proceeding further.

On the track menu, select Track Options. The Options dialogue opens. We will need to leave this open, so drag it somewhere where it doesn’t get in the way of your layout. You will see that it shows the default options, which we have used for laying track so far. (Standard gauge track with no ohle).

Press the Change button next to track type, and select another track type from the list. I’m going to use Metre, but you could try tram track, or one of the other possibilities.

Similarly, select an appropriate type of ohle mast:

Select ohle, and set the ohle height to something sensible for the tyoe of mast you’ve chosen.

These options are used to specify the type of track that you get when you lay new track. To apply them to existing track, you can use the Track Setting tool from the Tools menu.

Open the Track Setting dialogue, and select all the things you want to update:

Use Find Train to choose a train to follow. As you travel around the layout, the track is updated and overhead lines and masts appear:

You may need to switch to another train to get all the tracks done.

Tidying up

When you’ve got ohle all over the layout, you will need to tidy things up.

If the posts are on the wrong side of the track, right-click on the link and select Swap Track Side.

On sharp curves, double-click on the link and adjust the mast spacing so that the wire stays reasonably close to the track centreline.

import