NYC Subwy / Train Simulator

[n2ize]

I came across this program called OpenBVE yesterday morning. It looked interesting so I downloaded and installed it. It took a bit of system configuration and installation of a few extra systems libraries to get it running. Then I had to download and add the various routes and trains to the appropriate directories. By the evening yesterday I was operating the F Train en route from Manhattan to Brooklyn along with several other trains and subway lines.. There are two modes of operation. You can drive the train manually from the cab or you can have the "automatic driver" operate it. There are several different view modes, i.e track view", "cab view", "flyby view", etc. You can literally have the auto-driver operate the train for you and you can stand inside one of the train cars and ride along as a passenger. Or you can wait at a station ahead of the train along whatever route you are running and watch your train pull in, stop, open the doors, wait for passengers and then close the doors and pull out. The stations are pretty well designed, signals and signal operations are quite accurate, trains are quite accurately designed, sound effects are authentic as well as the station announcements as the train pulls in and pulls out of the stop. There are even additional messages such as warnings to watch your personal belongings, watch for pickpockets and report for suspicious packages. Some routes and trains also include passengers waiting on the platforms, track workers, etc. As a person who grew up and has lived in and around NYC I would say it is pretty accurate. Although most of the activity (routes, trains, etc.) seem to be centered around the NYCTA there are also other routes, trains and rail lines available and, anyone can build and contribute their own routes, stations, trains, add-on's etc.

If anyone is interested in this you can visit the following link.

http://www.bvestation.com/

Also a google search of "BVE" or "OpenBVE" will link you with numerous download resources, installation and operations instructions, design tools, trains, routes, etc.The primary difference I see are BVE might be proprietary and seems to run on Windows. OpenBVE runs on Linux, Win, and Mac and is more or less open source.

Here is a video..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-XRDrK0oWk

[n2ize]

Here is another video of OpenBVE in action with some footage of the view from the motormans cab..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UA83fZmTWs

[WØTKX]

How's the third rail simulation?

[n2ize]

How's the third rail simulation?

I haven't tried getting out of the train and putting one hand on the 3rd rail and the other on a grounded rail to see for myself. But, if it doesn't produce the desired results I suppose I can create such an outcome... since it is virtuality. But it is a cool program and I've been having some fun with it.

[N2NH]

Here is another video of OpenBVE in action with some footage of the view from the motormans cab..


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UA83fZmTWs

That's about right. I rode that subway for years. The BMT 4th Ave. line looks a lot like that, even to the cutouts of the wall between the express and local tracks. D or N train would be on those tracks. Try taking a D train southbound from 36th St. You go hard right through a #4 switch, then immediately up a steep incline to another curve (left). Hard for motormen to do with 10 cars of train behind them.

LINK Pedigree (http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Station:_36th_Street_%284th_Avenue%29)

Thanks for the link. I'll try it out tomorrow.

[NQ6U]

Working on getting it installed on my MacBook. Can't find the right OpenAL version, though.

[n2ize]

That's about right. I rode that subway for years. The BMT 4th Ave. line looks a lot like that, even to the cutouts of the wall between the express and local tracks. D or N train would be on those tracks. Try taking a D train southbound from 36th St. You go hard right through a #4 switch, then immediately up a steep incline to another curve (left). Hard for motormen to do with 10 cars of train behind them.

LINK Pedigree (http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Station:_36th_Street_%284th_Avenue%29)

Thanks for the link. I'll try it out tomorrow.

I added on a few older cars to my collection. An R1, an R16, and an R33. The R16 has full detailed train view. The cab view looks just like the real thing, the external view shows the outside of the train with open and closing foors and you can move the camera into any car and ride as if you are a passenger...simply take a seat and watch the scenery flying by the windows and the doors open (giving you a nice view of the station and platform outside) and they close and the train pulls in and out of the stations. The R3 gives you a nice realistic cab view, an external view but no inside view from the cars. The R1 is a cab only but it has some great sound effects such as that nice GRRRR sound as the old traction motors rev up as ell as the occaisional sound of the air compressors switching on and off in the various cars as they are needed to pump up the pressure for brake operation, the hissing sound as the air piston operated doors open and close and of course the sound of the air release as you pump and operate the brakes. The brakes on the R1 have 3 positions, service (SRV), lap (LAP) and release (REL). REL supplies full pressure to release the brakes. When you are stopping you have to quickly alternate between these 3 positions to maintain the right amount of brake pressure to make a smooth stop at 10 spot...assuming your running a 10 car train. This is how the real ones worked up until the R10's in which they integrated these positions to make braking easier. I hope they eventually add full train view (interior and exterior) to the R1. My R46 also has full train view in beautiful detail. So far I have added the following routes... A, B, C, F and D lines. I added the 2 line and it is awesome. It starts from Brooklyn and has a lot of awesome winding curves through Brooklyn and Manhattan. Unfortunately the route is not yet finished and it ends after 42nd street. . I was looking forward to taking it right on up through the Bronx... a nice el ride through the Bronx would have been great. Hopefully they will finish the rest of the route soon.


Definitely give it at try if you can. It can be a bit tricky to set it all up but its worth it. I'm running it on Linux but it also runs on Windows and macs. I don;t think there is any support for tablets yet..

[n2ize]

Working on getting it installed on my MacBook. Can't find the right OpenAL version, though.

I'm running it on fedora 19 Linux. I had to add a few things, including OpenAl and Mono. Didn't want to run at first but it turned out I had to add a few additional mono libraries. Hope it will still work when i upgrade to Fedora 20. I'm going to upgrade a machine here soon so I'll know soon enough if anything breaks.

[n2ize]

On a side note I noticed that a few of the videos I posted the strain simulations seem to be kind of choppy (slow or inconsistent frame rate). Could be that the person was using an older computer who's resources were being pushed. On my system it runs smooth as silk. My guess is that it should run smoothly on any new 64 bit system with a dual or multicore processor and even a halfway decent graphics cars. They reccomend an NVidea or GForce graphics card but I am using a standard onboard Intel graphics card which is part of a standard Dell desktop system and I am getting excellent performance on both my flight simulator (with heavy scenery enabled ) and the subway simulator.

[NQ6U]

I'm running it on fedora 19 Linux. I had to add a few things, including OpenAl and Mono. Didn't want to run at first but it turned out I had to add a few additional mono libraries. Hope it will still work when i upgrade to Fedora 20. I'm going to upgrade a machine here soon so I'll know soon enough if anything breaks.

Finally got it running! Now all I have to do is figure out how to download and install routes. I wonder if anyone has created San Diego Trolley lines.

[kb2vxa]

I'm waiting for a sim of the South Lake Union Trolley, Seattle's funniest mistake. Local cowboy singer Ken Cofield wrote a song about it, pretty funny. Too bad I can't attach such a big file I swiped from where I don't remember and it's not on You Tube, you'd have to pay 2 bucks for the CD so here's partial lyrics.

She’s the fastest girl you’d ever see.
She’s the South Lake Union Trolley.
The S.L.U.T. is a bump and grind machine
You can ride the S.L.U.T. down to the lake
You can take her on a coffee break.....

Just look at that big smile... but why does she have eyes on her chin?

[n2ize]

Finally got it running! Now all I have to do is figure out how to download and install routes. I wonder if anyone has created San Diego Trolley lines.

It's pretty simple. The trains and routes are usually stored in a separate directory structure separate and apart from the OpenBVE implementation. There are adequate instructions online for setting it up but, if you need help with it ask and I shall help. You can find plenty of routes and trains on the BVEStation site that I linked to. However, it seems that it is largely New York City oriented. However, you might google around for routes that are local to you are there are a lot of railfans and numerous rail sites and they mostly develope trains and routes that they are familiar with. There is also some Amtrack stuff out there. Over time more and more routes and trains should be appearing. There are also a lot of programs and resources for constructing your own routes and trains if you should be so inclined.

Thus far I have only focused on NYTA subway trains and routes. Eventually I might look for additional stuff.

[n2ize]

I decided to try and have a little fun. I drove the B train starting from 205th st (using a pre-overhaul R32) and drove it like a a jerk, disregarding all signals and just pouring on full speed between stops and jamming on the emergency brakes to try and reach a full stop at each stations. Some stations where I was going too fast I just said, "the hell with it" and kept on going to the next station. I continued on like a jackass blowing past more and more red signals. I made it as far as 125th street where I caught up with and smashed into the train ahead of me> I was still moving at around 45 mph with the emergency brakes on full. Of course if it were real life it would all be a heap of crumpled metal laying in severely damaged rails and the MTA wouldn;t have to worry about firing me and pressing criminal charges because I'd be dead.... Actually In real life I'd probably have never hit the other train because I'd have activated a tripper along the rails and that would have also applied my emergency brakes and stopped me. Then they would promptly fire me.

But, it's a simulation and when you run simulations sometimes you just have to go crazy, break every rule and act like a total ass. :lol:

[kb2vxa]

"However, you might google around for routes that are local to you are there are a lot of railfans and numerous rail sites and they mostly develope trains and routes that they are familiar with."

Sounds familiar, a while back my overlord at Altec Communications, Scott W2SJW was developing accurate images of rolling stock and drawing from my rather huge archives I sent him pictures of things he was working with. The result of course were trains that looked as real as possible. Oh, railfan sites are of limited value, you might have guessed the percentage of fans interested in sims is rather small. All things considered however, one in particular claims to and I agree has the BEST pictures on the web. http://www.railpictures.net/

[W5BRM]

I decided to try and have a little fun. I drove the B train starting from 205th st (using a pre-overhaul R32) and drove it like a a jerk, disregarding all signals and just pouring on full speed between stops and jamming on the emergency brakes to try and reach a full stop at each stations. Some stations where I was going too fast I just said, "the hell with it" and kept on going to the next station. I continued on like a jackass blowing past more and more red signals. I made it as far as 125th street where I caught up with and smashed into the train ahead of me> I was still moving at around 45 mph with the emergency brakes on full. Of course if it were real life it would all be a heap of crumpled metal laying in severely damaged rails and the MTA wouldn;t have to worry about firing me and pressing criminal charges because I'd be dead.... Actually In real life I'd probably have never hit the other train because I'd have activated a tripper along the rails and that would have also applied my emergency brakes and stopped me. Then they would promptly fire me.

But, it's a simulation and when you run simulations sometimes you just have to go crazy, break every rule and act like a total ass. :lol:

LOL Virtual terrorism at its finest!!! Wonder how long it'll take til aircraft simulators are used like that!! :rofl:

[n2ize]

LOL Virtual terrorism at its finest!!! Wonder how long it'll take til aircraft simulators are used like that!! :rofl:

I've tried things like that with flight simulators. In all honesty, most of the time I do a simulation I try to do everything right. If its a flight simulator a successful takeoff, navigation, landing, etc. On a train simulator a successful run following all the rules of the road. But every now and then that child-like urge to bend or break all the rules and be crazy hits me. The good part, it's only 1's and 0's inside a silicon wafer and can always be reset back to normal.. In real life there is unfortunately no reset button... LOL.

[NQ6U]

I used to have an early version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator (probably v1.x); it was pretty primitive compared to the latest version but I used to like to take off from SFO in a large passenger jet and see if I could fly it under both the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge without crashing. Harder to do than you'd think.

[n2ize]

I used to have an early version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator (probably v1.x); it was pretty primitive compared to the latest version but I used to like to take off from SFO in a large passenger jet and see if I could fly it under both the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge without crashing. Harder to do than you'd think.

Yeah, I remember having a very early version of MS. Flightsim that I was running on an old 8 bit Pc XT with a monochrome monitor and 20 MB hard drive. It was weird to see my planes and scenery in yellow on black. Of course the graphics were pretty primitive looking even in colour. Far cry from today's sims with realistic graphics, real time weather, GPS, full featured navigation, terrain, etc. I also tried flying under bridges except I used a simulated F-16. You got a real sense of speed looking dead ahead at the screen.

My main problem with simulators is that I find them addicting. Good thing about flight sims is that I can throw it on autopilot and let it run in the background freeing up my time to run other sims...:lol:

[kb2vxa]

Re: IZE:
"But, it's a simulation and when you run simulations sometimes you just have to go crazy, break every rule and act like a total ass."

Scott, the one I helped develop accurate images had a ball like that. He sent me some amazing screen shots of what happens in a sim but never in life, FLYING TRAINS! It happened in the UAL-UP merger too, but it was awfully hard on runways.

[n2ize]

Re: IZE:
"But, it's a simulation and when you run simulations sometimes you just have to go crazy, break every rule and act like a total ass."

Scott, the one I helped develop accurate images had a ball like that. He sent me some amazing screen shots of what happens in a sim but never in life, FLYING TRAINS! It happened in the UAL-UP merger too, but it was awfully hard on runways.

My guess is that thing would sink like a lead zeppelin.

[kb2vxa]

Not a problem..... until the next flight comes in.

[n2ize]

Not a problem..... until the next flight comes in.

That looks like it was a pretty hard landing.

[n2ize]

Re: IZE:
"But, it's a simulation and when you run simulations sometimes you just have to go crazy, break every rule and act like a total ass."

Scott, the one I helped develop accurate images had a ball like that. He sent me some amazing screen shots of what happens in a sim but never in life, FLYING TRAINS! It happened in the UAL-UP merger too, but it was awfully hard on runways.

I can imagine the driver of that train saying, "well, sometimes i drive my trains so fast they just sprout wings and lift off the tracks."

[kb2vxa]

Scott W2SJW did just that with his train sim, the screen shots he sent me were hysterical. Look at me, look at me, I'm flyyyYYYyyyinnng. (Sorry, Peter Pan.)