Great Eastern - stock track sections showing in places

Edit - after writing this long tale of woe, much to my surprise I found - 'stumbled upon' would be a beter desctiption - a fix, described at the end, so you might want to skip to that bit, if that's why you're reading this!

I've recently installed this rather good Making Tracks add-on into MSTS. I just have v.1, MT patches (if any for this one) seem hard to find nowadays.

Exploring the route in OR, I can see that while much of the trackwork is finely detailed, complete with Pandrol clips, some sections of track are crude, exhibiting severe localised moiré shimmer, having paler (concrete?) sleepers and a coarser track profile, visible mainly in the former of a much wider track head where the two join. The ballast is also lighter. You can see the difference clearly in this pic:



I recall having similar problems with London and South East - visible mostly as areas where there was no third rail, but should have been. I fixed this so that the route now all uses the right 'finescale' track. I may be mis-remembering this, but I think the fix was to download and put tsection.dat v.46 in the Global folder - like some other routes I have, LSE does not have a tsection.dat of its own, so presumably makes use of the global one.

Looking at the MSTS Global folder, I see that installing Great Eastern has installed in there three files, GreatEasternLtIinstalltsection.exe, and GreatEasternLtItsection.dat, both Last Modified in 2006, and tsection.preGreatEasternLondontoIpswitch - which is datestamped when I installed GE this evening and is obviously a back-up of my tsection.dat v.46, made by GE's installation. Reverting to that did not help.

To cap it all, running the same route in native MSTS, the track all displays as finescale! The coarse sections are not there!

Any suggestions as to what the source of this problem could be, would be most gratefully received!

Edit - to make matters worse, the shimmering track isback, in LSE! This was fixed by Ged's ukfs-fix2-1, but something seems now to have unfixed it! I tried deleting the fix's folder and re-installing it but no dice!!! Ths shimmering is back!

Further edit before hitting the sack - I think that re-running Ged's UKFSfix on the ukfs files in MSTS's global/shapes folder has restored the fix to the shimmering in LSE, but at a cost -  I am pretty sure I no longer have a third rail everywhere I should. I am beginning to wonder if GE made a fresh install of some or all UKFS files in the global/shapes folder, hence undoing the anti-shimmer fix. Maybe not, as GE seems to have a shed-load of ukfs files of its own, in its own shapes subfolder. But if that's what happened, installing a new route presents more of a hazzard, at least in Open Rails, than merely over-writing a more modern tsection.dat file. The coarse track sections are still there in GE. I'm beginning to think I need to uninstall everything and start again, this time keeping routes apart, time to find out how to create mini-routes which seems to be the way of doing this.

Final edit, now well past my bed-time - turning off OR's superelevation has fixed the track in Great Eastern - no more coarse scale sections. Pity some track sections (Dynatrax may be implicated?) won't display properly with OR elevation, even at 1, but there it seems to be.

Which leaves me with the problem that somewhere along the line with all my faffing about, long sections of third rail in LSE that were there before, are no longer there...I'm fairly sure. Maybe need to zap LSE, then re-install it and re-apply the shimmer fix.

Final, final edit - killing the superelevation seems also to have restored a full complement of third rail in LSE. Could have sworn that wasn't a problem earlier, but there it is.  Either that, or sleep deprivation is getting to me!

Hi Ivor,
That was quite an epistle!!

I assume that, in the end, everything is OK again?

Regarding the UKFS shimmering, if, after you've fixed it, you install another route which adds UKFS track, the fixing will have been undone! A side effect is that the special file created by UKFS_Fix2 is not removed and further running of it will indicate that the fix has already been applied! Unfortunately, there's not much I can do about that! The good thing is that rerunning the fix, even on an already fixed set, doesn't seem to have a detrimental effect on either MSTS or Open Rails.

Cheers,
Ged

Thanks again Ged - I've just edited in an intro to the original post, the better to avoid wasting anyone else's time!

I don't suppose I can absolutely rule out some other factor in my configuration being implicated. But evidence that turning off supervalation did the biz is apparent in a comparison of this first pic, taken IIRC about a mile out of Cannon Street, with superelevation on (at '1') and no third rail, granted the Thumper doesn't need them...



...with this second shot of a 4CIG at the same location, superelevation set to zero in OR settings and third rails back in evidence.



Now that I know what to look for, it seems that UK Finescale track needs a profile that works with the OR superelevation feature, but none seems to be available.

Despite these now resolved tribulations and the occasional irritation like DEMU/EMU bogies jiggling and visibly but not actually derailling on some points, I'm thoroughly enjojing playing LSE and indeed other MSTS content in OR. I appreciate the ability to push out the horizon reducing object draw-in, reduced loading stutter, and much sharper, full-screen graphics on my 1600x900 display, amongst other things. Before, I tended to dabble in MSTS, not I'm getting into activities. And London South Coast has just arrived, so I'm off to install run that now - pic of Electrostar out of Victoria shows my first trip:



Making Tracks in particular certainly made some great...well, tracks! Yes it's nice to have better representation of AWS/TPWS in Rail Simulator but I doubt my old box of tricks never mind my wallet would be up to later releases thereof, and the MSTS content is much cheaper and often very good indeed. Plus of course there's the support of a keen, knowledgeable and helpful community, not least here on TSSH.