TITLE: 2 am Call
NAME: Dave Merchant
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: kosh@nesys.com
WEBPAGE: www.nesys.com
TOPIC: Night
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: 2am_call.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    povray 3.01

TOOLS USED: 
    Photoshop to create image maps, copyright, and JPEG conversion

RENDER TIME: 
    45 hours (because AA 0.1 was needed to get the jaggies,
          and all that steam and smoke)

HARDWARE USED: 
    P120, 40 mb RAM, W95

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


MONITOR SETUP NOTES

Monitor setup is always difficult with a night scene. To facilitate viewing
adjustments, here is a description of the lighting conditions being
represented.

It is a cold, clear, moonlit night, in a rail yard surrounded by cornfields,
with no big cities to add illumination. All lighting is provided by the
hanging 150 watt unfrosted incandescent bulbs seen, some more fixtures
hanging out of view beyond the engines, the orange fires, and the
photographer's "Ultrablitz" flash array (a circle of 6 flash bulbs, each
bulb the size of a household light bulb, in a 24 inch bowl reflector.
There are also small incandescent fixtures below the back of the engine
cabs, to illuminate the tender steps. These are run on the low voltage DC
from the turbogenerators, and are intentionally not very bright, to preserve
night vision. The headlights are turned off, but pick up the ambient light.

Due to the slow films available at the time, exposure time is about 30
seconds, accounting for the blurred appearance of the smoke and steam.

This was a time period where halogen lights (iodine or sodium) were still
in the future, and fluorescents were rarely used outside, so everything is
lit by either incandescents or kerosene lanterns (which can be very bright
white).

The snow hasn't had time to get dirty, and shines bright in the moonlight.


THE SCENE

"2 am Call"

Nickel Plate Road engine terminal
Bellevue, Ohio,
January, 1957, 1:45 am

The snow has stopped for a while, although some has drifted across the 
tracks. The hostlers are getting NKP 2-8-4 758 ready for an eastbound 
perishable train, 85 cars of frozen beef for the eastern markets, crew 
called for 2 am. The cargo is worth well over a million dollars, and any 
delay means missing the markets in New York City and Boston,
and possible loss due to spoilage.

The 758's steam gage is showing 215 pounds, but climbing nicely, and by the
time the outbound crew arrives, they will have a hot, clean engine to
work with. Someone is working on 763's fire while waiting for the tender
water tank to fill, casting an orange glow across the scene.

Steam locomotives, like ships, have individual personalities.
The 763, on the left, was considered the queen of the fleet,
the easiest to keep hot, and always easy riding.

The 758, 742, and 763 don't have much snow on them, because they
haven't been in the terminal long, and won't be sitting there much longer.
They will all be back out on the road earning revenue within the hour.
Average idle time for servicing and turning these engines was under
1.5 hours, due to low-maintenance design and planned work flow.

758's train pulled in from Kansas City a few minutes ago with the 765,
and is currently being spotted at the ice plant across the yard, to get the 
ice bunkers topped off. In this weather, it doesn't take much ice, but it's
cheap insurance with a cargo this valuable.

The engine will run straight through to Buffalo, NY, with a quick stop in 
Cleveland to set out a few cars for the Northern Ohio Food Terminal, and at
Conneaut, Ohio to change crews, grease the crankpins, and take on coal 
and water. In Buffalo, the Lackawanna RR will take over for the rest of
the journey east.

Speed limit for freight trains on the line was 60 mph, about 100 kph.
Due to the high speeds, and the many unprotected road crossings on the
line, these engines were equipped with Mars lights (invented by a man
named Mars, the owner of the Mars candy company), which oscillated in a
horizontal figure 8 (infinity) pattern. The drive motor could also be
stopped, for use as an extra headlight. The insides of the bells were
painted red, so they would flash red as the bell swung.
Day or night, the engines were quite intimidating.

At about the same time the Mars lights were added, most of the old bulb
headlights were retrofitted with dual sealed beam headlights, as seen on
the 763. The 742, under the coal dock, still has the old style headlight.
The additional electrical load of the extra lights and radio, and in some
cases, Automatic Train Stop or ATS, which stopped the train if it passed
a red signal, required the use of 2 or 3 turbogenerators, instead of the
nore common single unit.

The Bellevue coal dock was somewhat unusual.
NKP favored cylindrical, rather than square coal docks.
This monster could handle 4 engines simultaneously.
The model presented here has been compromised slightly. The actual dock
was taller than shown, but has been shortened a bit to fit in the scene.
Note the lines left in the concrete by the wooden forms.

Another compromise, the tracks through the Bellevue coal dock area were on a
wide curve, but straight tracks improved the composition of the scene.

This scene looks to the northeast, towards the future site of the hump yard.
The roundhouse is to the left, the ice plant is to the right, and the large
grain elevator is hidden beyond the 758.


Why 2 am?

Railroading has been a true 24 hour business since the 1850's, with 
nearly equal train density day and night. In fact, many railroads run more
trains at night, to allow track maintenance to take place in daylight.

Railroads pioneered many of the early advances in lighting, and developed 
early signaling and communications technology for safe operation in 
reduced visibilty and at night.


The Nickel Plate Road

The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad, always known as the
Nickel Plate Road, was a smaller road which flourished in competition 
with its much larger parallel rival, the New York Central System,
by pioneering, in the 1920's, scheduled fast freight service, with
guaranteed delivery times, an idea which is still novel to many companies.

The company turned liabilities into assets, realizing the need to 
maximize utilization of their small physical plant, keeping trains moving 
instead of sitting in yards, and minimizing delays out on the line.
The company devised a bonus system which rewarded fast, safe operation.
The limitations of a single track main line were overcome by scheduling, 
knowing where each train would be at any hour of day or night, and where 
trains would pass each other.

The result was a highly efficient operation, which continues to this day 
in much the same way, under the ownership of Norfolk Southern System.


Super Power

In the late 1920's, the Nickel Plate was one of the pioneers of 
horsepower and efficiency improvements in locomotives, by participating
directly with the locomotive manufacturers, primarily Lima Locomotive
Works in Lima, ("Lye-ma") Ohio, in designing and testing new
thermodynamic concepts.

The result was the 2-8-4, the first in a family of "Super Power" engines,
which represented a quantum leap from previous designs. The design was
known as the "Berkshire", after the Boston and Albany Railroad's mountain
line in Massachusets where the concept was first proved.

The heart of this design was a much larger boiler and firebox than
previous engines, allowing continuous maximum horsepower output with
significantly reduced fuel and water consumption. The idea was to
overdesign the system, so that maximum output could be achieved without
strain. The boiler could produce more dry, superheated, high pressure
steam on a continuous basis than the cylinders could use. Superheating
means heating steam well past its boiling point. It continues to expand
as the water molecules get more energetic and further apart, resulting in
much more available horsepower per pound of fuel and water consumed.

The big firebox allowed a thinner firebed, which could burn more
efficiently. There were many thermodynamic and gas flow optimizations
throughout the design, with extensive use of laboratory model simulations.
The resultant design remained competitive with early diesels
until the late 1940's or early 1950's. Road reliability was about equal
to that of current diesels.

These were very "Technical" engines, with many external gadgets, and a
great deal of internal subtlety. Due to many automatic controls and power
assists, they were easier to operate than older, smaller locomotives.

Many of these engines were equipped with steam and signal lines to allow
them to be used in pulling heavy passenger trains.

The Nickel Plate engines lasted until 1958, and were planned to keep
operating for several more years, but fell to the 1958 business recession
and difficulty in obtaining spare parts.

These were the engines I grew up with, seeing and hearing them daily
until age 14. We've been to Bellevue many times, and have seen the
locations, engines, and events described here.

It wasn't originally supposed to be a snow scene,
but the drifts came out so nice...


Weathering Notes

The generally grubby appearance of these engines in daily use was in sharp
contrast to the high quality of mechanical maintenance bestowed upon them.
The very fast turnaround times in the terminals and hard nosed economics 
didn't allow much time for making them pretty.

The combination of grease, oil, soot, white sand for traction, and boiler
water treatment chemicals caused them to be a varied gray-brown color,
streaked with white. The areas of the fireboxes that were not covered with
lagging were normally a dark rusty color. Drivers were often nearly white
from traction sand, and tenders were usually a uniform dusty brown.

Additionally, parts were frequently spot painted in areas where repairs were
made, so that some parts might be shiny black, while the majority of the
engine was light brown. The boiler fronts were painted more frequently than 
the rest of the engines, and the cabs were easier to clean and therefore
often contrasted with the overall appearance.

These engines differed from many others in that the smokebox was sheathed,
so that only the lower portion of the firebox was visible as bare metal.

The cabs were roomy, about 10 feet wide by 8 feet long, with a high arched
roof to let heat escape. The interior walls and ceiling were lined with
narrow wood wainscoting for insulation, painted a medium green.
There was provision to set a coffee pot on the backhead above the fire
door, and meals could be cooked using hot coals.

Combined with the polished brass gauges and valves, cozy fire, sizzling
steam, and subdued electric lighting, the effect was that of an exclusive
men's club, which is exactly what it was.

Picture an airliner's cockpit, with a fireplace added.



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


This is all CSG, in standard POV-Ray 3.01.

When you look at pix of the real engines, they are extremely complex, with
a huge number of small details. I had to simplify them quite a bit to keep
the object count at a reasonable level. These models could easily have
twice as many objects in them and still underplay the complexity of the
real thing.

I also put in lots of conditionals, so I could vary the level of detail on
each individual engine depending on viewing angle and distance from the
camera, thus reducing the number of objects some more.

Object count is 2964.

I worked from very sketchy plans and lots of photographs. Colors are based
on photographs and personal memories, framed in the school bus window.
Since these engines stayed in service so long, they were photographed more
than many other engines.

Note that at least 6 of these engines still exist, and two of them, 759 and
765, were used extensively for passenger excursions in recent times,
so at least there's plenty of documentation to work from.

The drifting snow is a couple of image maps tiled together, based on the
randomized image map example in the POV docs, with a bit of BUMPS thrown in
on top for texture.

Concrete form lines on the coal dock are via a gradient map, to produce the
grooved effect. This method eliminated the jaggies I was getting from a GIF
image map. A large-scaled BUMPS pattern was added to mottle the whole thing.

The driver counterweights on these engines really do stick out a couple of
inches past the wheel treads. In service, the counterweights were often
more noticeable than the siderods.

Several different chrome, silver, and brass textures are used, but aren't
very noticeable in this scene.

Firebox texture is two image maps superimposed, first a bunch of tileable
vertical rusty streaks, and second was a single staybolt, tiled. These were
laid onto the separate parts of the firebox to get the correct direction
change halfway down the side. All created in Photoshop very quickly.

There are two kinds of staybolts on these engines, the large array of flat
ones, done with a tiled image map, and the round headed flexible ones at the
front of the firebox, done in 3-D in a while loop. The flexible ones were
being added at the last minute, and I didn't have time to really get them
looking right, so I omitted them from the IRTC version. The complete version
will be available on my web site.

Streaks on boiler barrel and other parts were BUMPS, stretched in Y and Z.
This method avoids the jaggies you get with image maps.

Note that the fronts of the boilers are fairly clean, which is correct,
the fronts got cleaned and painted more often than the rest of the engine.

Night sky is an edit of one of the standard POV skies, with the color map
toned down, probably too far, needs a tiny bit of midnight blue to be right.

Headlights and marker lights do not have light sources or glass in them,
they're just spherical silver reflectors, which pick up the ambient light
and bounce it around. The real Mars lights actually did have the wierd
reflective effect seen here.

Note that headlights were turned off when sitting in terminals, to avoid
blinding workers.

Numbers on front number boards and number plate are TTF's, while the numbers
on the cab side and the NYC&StL lettering on the sand dome are image maps.
I didn't have the correct Nickel Plate font, so I picked the closest
approximation and touched it up in Photoshop before writing it as a GIF.

Steam gage face was an image made by a separate render, converted to a GIF,
and used as an image map in the final image.

All lights have a pretty steep fade distance and a bit of yellow color
to represent incandescent lights.

There are a couple of orange lights in each firebox, and one in each cab.
One additional orange light is next to 763's firebox, to represent the
fire light leaking past the ash pan.

I tried haze around the fireboxes, but rendering times went thru the roof.
One attempt is on my web page, that little picture took many hours.

Smoke and steam are halos, with some attempts to randomize the effects.
These took the majority of the rendering time.

At any antialias less than AA 0.1, I was getting some nasty jaggies,
so I had to take the time hit of 0.1.

Just like real night photography, I'm not exactly sure where the big shadow
of a light fixture on the coal dock is coming from. I think it's from the
photographer's flash array. This stuff drives real photographers crazy.

Note the curved reflections on the elliptical railheads in front of the 763.

There are many details on these models which are not visible in this
scene. More views are on my web site, www.nesys.com.

Also, some parts of the scene will look kinda cool zoomed in to 2:1.

The text and story aren't pirated, I wrote it all.

Any questions about the pix, email to kosh@nesys.com.


