Conn McCarthy, VR Horton, Chris Lee, Rob Easterday and Cyrus Lum have been putting the finishing touches on the latest Train Artisan offering for this fall!

Conn has done an excellent job in modeling this famous steam engine for MSTS. VR Horton has created some highly realistic textures for both the locomotive and the excursion cars. Chris Lee and Conn have also fine tuned the engine physics while Rob does his magic with lighting and custom sounds. Cyrus is also creating a new photo-realistic cab for this surviving steam locomotive.

Engineer, Don Wirth, has been instrumental in supplying us with custom reference and data so that we could recreate this locomotive faithfully in MSTS.

Keep checking back at Train Artisan for more news about all of the features of this trainset along with availability.....for now, here's some more screenshots till then!

Have you had the desire to paint the new updated SD40-2 to other liveries but needed the prototypical headlight arrangment or other features to match?

Well, you can do this with the one model! The tip is to modify the alpha channel of the texture maps.

You see, the SD40-2 was mapped in a way that gave nearly each part a unique spot on the texture map. If you blacken out a spot on the alpha channel, the piece of locomotive that corresponds to that area of the texture map will become invisible.

Here's an example:

To achieve this SD40-2 prototypical headlight/nose arrangement

Use TGATOOL2 to open sd402.ace and convert it to a .tga. Go into a paint program that supports alpha channel editing (like photoshop), enter the alpha channel editing mode, find the black square just under the front cab windows (lower left side of the texture) and paint it white. This will now cover up and hide the nose headlight.

To uncover the overhead headlight, open the texture file, sd40202.ace with the same procedure as above. In the alpha channel, you'll see a black box in the lower right - paint that white.

Save both of these textures as .tga and convert them back to .ace files with the makeace utility that comes with MSTS. Back up your old textures somewhere (so you can revert back to the original version) and put these into the sd402 directory.

Try experimenting with this technique - you'll find that you can also rearrange where the horn is as well as determine the prototypical layout of the rear grab irons...

While this ability has already been discovered by other repainters in the last couple of days and mentioned in the train-sim forums, we thought we'd bring it up again in case you missed it....

Yep - you heard right! Train Artisan has been working with Kuju to create content for MSTS 1.2!

Now at least you know one of the reasons why we've been quiet - this was our summer project. We were fortunate to be working from exclusive photographs of BNSF locomotive #8010. We had pictures from all angles including inside the cab.

The locomotive and cabview was modeled by Cyrus Lum. The caboose, caboose passenger view, cement car and reefer car were modeled by Conn McCarthy. Textures were painted to perfection by VR Horton and Chris Lee was the man with all of the info and reference data.

Kuju handled all of the work involved with the .eng and the .cvf file and the sounds

The Train Artisan website moves to a new server!

Traffic to the website has always been high and the result was always that it took a few tries before you could get in! Over the past month, we've been looking for a new host who could handle the kind of bandwidth that we need in order to run a high bandwidth site. (Our bandwidth fluctuates between 20Gig and 45Gig a month and that's just with html and jpeg files!)

We're now happily being hosted at Flight1.com! We hope that you'll notice the difference that these more powerful servers provide......we're gonna need it with all of the new stuff coming up!

Something else new?.........

Train Artisan is now incorporated and now known as Train Artisan Inc.!

There have been lots of things going on in the background in the past several months which has led Train Artisan to take this next important step in its growth as a company.

We hope to make some exciting announcements in the future about what's been going on lately.......

Cameron Lashley and VR Horton have done it again!

What you are seeing are previews of the Baldwin RF-16 "Sharknose." Not only have they been working hard on the locomotive model, but they have also created a fantastic new cab!

Cameron Lashley, VR Horton and Chris Lee have been unstoppable!

What you are seeing is a partial roster of the new GP30s. Some of you may remember the first version that Cameron brought to the train community scene awhile back.

This new version is a great improvement on the high quality original! Beta testing is underway so keep an eye on TrainArtisan.com for more news about the release of this new work of art!

Yes - we have even more projects going on - the Frisco 1522, the GS4 4449 and our first route, the famous San Francisco to Los Angeles Southern Pacific Coast Line.

Drop by next week when we'll give you more details and show you more screenshots!

For now, here's a preview....

In Memory of the Victims and Heroes of September 11th

Our Admiration for these Fallen Heroes Will Never Perish

We would like to thank all of those who have joined with Train Artisan to help the surviving families during the past year.

Train Artisan's Cyrus Lum just got back from a trip to California! He was there mainly for a planning offsite for the next Game Developer's Conference - a major conference for the computer and video game industry where he is also an advisory board member.

"I figured since I was out in California, I'd take a ride on the old SP commuter line from San Jose to San Francisco to gather reference data for the SP Coast line route.

I wanted to experiment with some new ideas of gathering data for route building so I brought along a digital camera, a Mini DV Camcorder, and the Garmin V portable GPS tracker. I turned both the Camcorder and GPS tracker on at the start in San Jose. The GPS recorded lat/lon/elevation data every second and was synched up to the camcorder so I'd know where buildings and major landmarks where. I also marked waypoints for various track objects.

At each station, I was able to get out and snap some pictures for textures (Caltrain is in the process of restoring the historical train stations...). Once I arrived in San Francisco, I walked along Townsend street between 3rd and 7th(the street along the Caltrain Station), taking pictures of some of the surviving and original buildings for more textures. I also video taped the ride back, sitting on the opposite side.

I used to live in the Bay Area when I was very young and I have great memories of riding the SP from my home in San Carlos to visit my Grandmother in San Francisco. Having the opportunity to recreate this route as it was in the 40's and 50's in MSTS is definitely a labor of love. It really makes you feel somewhat like a paleontologist in trying to recreate a route from a time period long gone.(The trackage has changed significantly from 1950...) While I was born 10-20 years after this period, I am receiving help from my grandparents who took a large number of photos along the commuter line back then."

-Cyrus Lum

Pictures:Above - Inside the Cahill Station in San Jose

Below - 4th and Townsend Yard in San Francisco

Entering the Cahill Station in San Jose.

VR Horton is certainly a busy man!

From his artful hands come a B&O, a Wabash and Penn Central for the Train Artisan F7.

Look for these to be available in the next week or two....

Train Artisan has been busy lately with several projects - some are in-house and some are external contracts. Over the next several months, as we are able to, we'll start revealing what we've been working on! Many surprises.....

Train Artisan was fortunate enough to be invited by Microsoft to attend the National Model Railroad Convention in Florida.

Not only did we get to show our products in the booth, we also had vendors selling American Classics on the show floor. One of them was Daylight Sales. The response was tremendous!

We nearly ran out of brochures on the first day. By the second day, we practically sold out of the stock of American Classics that was brought to the show...even the samples that we had got sold off!

We were able to take a nice picture of the booth above before the show started. There were several kids who hung around the booth most of the time. They couldn't get enough of it!

Things really got going when I would run our F7 Super Chief or the GS4 4449. With the volume up, I'd blow the horn or toot the whistle and people would make their way over - curious about what was going on.

At one point, I left the booth to go look around and could hear our 4449 whistle as people kept playing with the add-on. Rob Easterday did a great job with the sounds - everybody kept commenting about how real it felt.

It was great to meet the people of Maple Leaf Tracks. Jason, Andy, Dawn, and I had a fun time and we even started talking about synergy between the two groups. Can you imagine what a joint product would be like between the two of us?........

Rick Selby and the Microsoft crew were great hosts - they treated us to several nights on the town. Great food and fun! It was also great to hear the Microsoft perspective on the Train Sim scene. These people really do care about the product!

Another person who we had the pleasure of meeting was Paul Astley of Kuju. He defintely knows his stuff when it comes to MSTS.

We also attracted the attention of several seasoned brass model designers. These guys do freelance plan and design work for all of the major brass manufacturers and they were impressed with the 4449 that we were showing. These guys even offered to help us with whatever we needed.....I'll tell you, we really made some great contacts at the show!

Overall, the show went very good for Microsoft, Maple Leaf Tracks and Train Artisan. We made new friends and formed some great relationships that are very exciting!

Life....is good!

We're still buzzing from our trip to Portland, Oregon to see the 4449!

Dave Brown of the Friends of the 4449 Inc and engineer, Doyle McCormack invited us over to Portland for exclusive access to the 4449 as she was being fired-up and prepared to pull the Art Train for the July 4th celebrations.

We were able to take tons of reference photos of every inch of the 4449. We got access to areas of the loco to take rare close-up shots that are just wild! Our thanks go out to James, Skylar, and Harvey for guiding us around the loco and roundhouse.

Later in the trip, we got to ride in the cab as Doyle and his young fireman Skylar ran the 4449 down the mainline.

Wanna know more about our trip and the 4449? Well, we're creating a new webpage to showcase this marvelous locomotive and to help bring attention to the plight of the Friends of the 4449 and their search for a permanent home for the 4449....keep an eye out in the coming weeks!

Until then, please visit the Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation and see how you can help support the most "Beautiful Locomotive in the World"

We've been playing around lately with route design. What you are seeing here is the first leg of Southern Pacific's famous Coast Line route at the old 3rd and Townsend station in San Francisco, California. (That's right, we've turned back the clock!)

We've managed to create all custom textures and geometry (accept for the track geometry and the wonderful sky courtesy of Sky Conductor II).

We really wanted to bring back the old stomping grounds for the 4449 to stretch out her legs.

Keep an eye out at Train Artisan for more info about this route........

Even with the sad events surrounding the 1522, we're still moving ahead with the add-on!

Fresh from the paint shop and VR Horton's masterful hands comes the stylish passenger cars for the 1522.

This add-on is really shaping up well!

That's right! Conn McCarthy's excellent USRA Light Mountain is got updated to include our standard steam cab!

We've added our famous custom Steam cab and sounds to the Mountain download. We've also made the cab set-up easier so you can alias the steam cab to any other locomotive that you have in your Train-sim Roundhouse.

Download it under the FREE section now!

Rick Lamp is the energizer bunny of repaints!

Take a look at his latest: Amtrak transition paint from PRR and Amtrak2

Club TA members, come on in and grab your's now!