Pele Light Rail

Written 9 April, 2007

Pele Light Rail

For about a month now, I’ve been running Kitto Flora’s little train in a loop around the 3072 lot that used to belong to Dodgeguy Woodward.

It has operated flawlessly.

This weekend I dismantled the test loop and laid some serious rail.

Because the Xubi house sits hard against the sim corner I decided not to run the rail all the way around the quarter of a sim I own. For aesthetic reasons, I decided not to run the rail all the way to the summit of Pele—but that left more than 8000 square meters on which I COULD run the train.

The new rail line enters Dodge’s former lot a few meters from the beach near the sim edge (ocean) and snakes around and through the DG parcel and another 3072 parcel. Then it passes a Brylcreem ad and dives into the lagoon and traverses an underwater bridge, surfacing at the Pele Gardens.

There the train reaches a junction that shunts the train either through or away from the Pele Gardens.

The Pele Gardens circuit skirts the edge of the parcel, following the lagoon on the southern border and the ocean to the west, then climbs the flanks of Pele before diving under a walkway and entering the river via a tunnel (which is being shaped into a scary tiki head. The line follows the river bed to the junction with the bypass, then rises to enter Dodge’s former property near the ocean, completing the loop.

There have been a few glitches, which were entirely my fault and not at all the fault of the train. I had to replace a curve I had placed directly after the first junction and add a short section of straight track before the turn started (should have read the notecard), and I had to deal with a section of track that routinely derailed the engine (this turned out to be caused by circling fish, which I relocated. And occasionally I would get a section of the track (it’s one-way) turned around and derail the train.

Kitto has been great about coming out to help me when I get into difficulty.

When I went to bed last night, the train seemed to be working properly—but when my friend Peter Stinberg rode this morning, one of the carriages had a mind of its own and took the left junction, while the train took a right.

That was a small glitch.

The big glitch was the black engine was nowhere to be seen.

There was an IM section from the engine that suggested it had tried to enter a banned parcel, meaning it had crossed Damian Marseille’s land somehow.

I IMed Kitto, who told me the engine could most likely be found at 200 meters.

And there it was, hanging in the clouds looking forlorn, its scripts disabled.

It turned out the engine, in going directly to its home, had crossed a corner of Damian’s land and shut down because the parcel didn’t allow object entry.

A rerouting of the track solved that problem.

The train is running well now. It’s a hoot to ride, chugging along and blowing smoke, whistling as it approaches the various stations along the route. It’s especially fun to watch it dip under the water.

Mouse mode is especially awesome on the train.

I’ve done some work on the bottom of the lagoon, using huge prims to place beds of yellow and blue coral and rock outcroppings here and there, and there are scary sea critters, including a squid, an octopus, a moray eel, and Harry the Humpback—who, my friend Peter Stinberg tells me, is pregnant.

Anyone can drive the train, so if you have payment info on file for your avatar, feel free to go to the Forsaken sim and drive it.

Pictures follow.