Craven Railway

Suggested NSWGR rolling stock for use on Craven - both MSTS and Open Rails (OR)

Compiled by Brian Bere-Streeter

Introduction

The Craven Timber Railway route is set in the time period from 1919 to 1933.

The majority of the available MSTS NSWGR rolling stock is post-WW2 era, and therefore we need to be selective about which stock could legitimately be run along the NSWGR Main North Coast line through Craven.

Additionally, some stock, although of early building dates, is presented in the preservation era liveries and conditions, and again would be unsuitable.

Locomotives

Passenger

Carriages

Wagons

4-wheel types

Special Stock & General Notes

Any of the 30T and 35T breakdown cranes could run along this section of line, especially the 35T Ransomes and Rapier crane (built 1915) based at Casino.

Although both 32 class and 35 class were around during this era, the available models are only in later rebuilt condition and therefore not suitable for this route.

Class 50 locomotives could be used, but the range of available 53 class is more than adequate for the needs of this route.

There may have been the odd occurence of a 13 class 4-4-2 tank being 'hired' for picnic trains along the route.

The end-platform (FO)cars were restricted to Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong services at this time - it was not until the mid-late 30's that the cars were converted to tourist format and used all over the NSWGR state lines.

Notes for MSTS Users

It is anticipated that existing MSTS users will more than likely have already downloaded the required stock and will have minimal problem in creating suitable Consists to run on the NSWGR lines in this route.

Notes for OR Users

The Open Rails train simulator software is a completely new freeware software package that has backward compatibility with the now discontinued Microsoft Train Simulator.

Thee following notes apply to adding additional stock not covered by the Craven Install Instructions.

In some cases the existing range of MSTS routes and rolling stock may be able to be sucessfully run under Open Rails, however, you may find items that may be incompatible. Incompatibilities will exist where stock is aliased to default cabviews, sounds, and other default MSTS objects

With the MSTS system, the software is installed under a primary folder called << Train Simulator >> - in the OR system for Craven, this becomes << Open Rails Train Simulator >>. Bearing in mind that all the existing routes and rolling stock for MSTS was designed to be installed into the << Train Simulator >> folder (and its sub-folders), there may need to be some manual file copying, changing of pathname in the exe, or file moving, etc to get the OR system in a working condition.

Under MSTS, locomotives also required to have a << Cabview >> subfolder and a << Sound >> subfolder - in some cases this may entail downloading separate file sets to enable the locomotives to run correctly. The 'readme' files that come with the rolling stock downloads will identify any other downloads necessary to be downloaded to make them a 'working' model. Please make sure you read the installation instructions and check that any reference to the << Train Simulator >> folder should be changed to 'Open Rails Train Simulator' folders.

In some instances the references to sounds and cabviews may point to default MSTS stock, which may not be available to non-MSTS users. You will need to investigate any addons on a case by case basis as to whether they will run without any problems in the OR install.

Finding Rolling Stock