Anyone still making physical trains?

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Seems like the only train vehicles roaming the SLRR today are all non physical, i was wondering if anyone still made "proper" vehicle trains.

[Qie Niangao]

Oh sure there are still some physical trains on the SLRR, although the nature of train control makes the physical vehicle behaviour less important than for other vehicles.

Also, most physical trains made in the past few years are a kind of hybrid, where the guidance is based on sensors, not on bumping along a hidden center guide rail (which never really worked all that well in any version of Havok, and failed quite spectacularly for a while). In fact, on newer stretches of the SLRR (e.g., Spangle to Yucca) those center guide rails are phantom.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I understand why you guys want to change the rails to phantom... but please don't... rail grinding works fine if the track is properly made and as long as you stay away from sim crossings. Scripts can't have that level of reaction time. I've been banging my head on how to get my behemoth of a train to sit on the track (it has two bogies that represent the contact poitns with the track) without relying solely collisions with the center rail. I know most trains are short enough that their length isn't a factor, but with 18 meters between axles... it just looks and feel wrong.

[Stryker Jenkins]

Generaly the Linden Lab owned SLRR tracks have a fixed non-phantom guide. As I understand it only where new track are laid be LDPW they may consider to make them phantom e.g. on road section (tracks crossing, parrallel or over the SL road network), as not to impeed road traffic. Only the LDPW can make that call on public Linden Lab owned land.

However it is free to any privat resident to make their SLRR-type tracks on their land as they see fit.

[Burper Tilling]

There are very realistic virtual railway simulators about now, so probably most people who want a virtual railway experience use them rather than SL.   The only problem with those is you can't be an avatar, you have to be a train driver, which means, in effect, being the train itself.  So the train is your avatar!