It’s not the first time I’ve worked on Japan rails, but I’ve decided to restart. And this time I want to share my progress.
I’ve already wanted to restart ever since 1.19 came out, but I worked on the Netherlands for a while, mapping out bus lines.
I will not do that in this project. Not yet anyway.
My priorities for this are:
- Train lines (heavy rail, high speed, …)
- Metro lines
- Tram lines
- Station detailing
- Local lines (as opposed to express/rapid services)
My weakness is timetables, so I will not do those, I will autorun everything.
This means some lines are just nearly impossible to make, and require simplification. These are the through-running trains.
For some these are fairly simple, where two lines essentially function as one, where trains run seamlessly between them. The idea is that those lines will be merged as a single line bearing both names.
For complex through-running, I will likely just keep them split up, and trains end at their technical terminus.
Another problem are rapid trains. I handle these as separate lines, but due to the lack of timetabling, I might skip some of these to prevent constant back-ups of trains waiting for a moment to pass them.
I’m still figuring out which tilemap to use. For the Netherlands, I used ESRI as it provided very high quality satellite view, but for Japan it is much less. I’m not keen on using Google Maps one, as it seems to have an slight offset, misaligning anything mapped over it.
Alongside it I use OpenStreetMap, as it sometimes provide up-to-date data, as satellite views are usually a few years old.
This will be a truly long-term project, as there are hundreds of train lines, with thousands of stations.
Most of my information is gathered from Wikipedia, as contributors there have built a great database of lines, stations, even train makes. I use rail company websites to see more detailed maps of stations, like platform numbers, which lines use which platforms, et cetera. I will probably link/show these on line/station update posts.
As of writing this introduction, I already have 2,570 hours in NIMBY Rails. It’s bound to become much higher..
Leave a Reply