ICRR 2600 Class - Arriving April 6th

6 minutes ago
3 min read

Check out our latest update on the progress of the commissioned Illinois Central 2600 Class!

This was the last major commissioned project we had the pleasure of working on over the course of 1 year and 5 months, beginning in October 2024. It was a large project involving one type of locomotive and two variations, a standard 40ft ICRR steel boxcar model, and two 1925 ICRR Pullman Heavyweight cars, a baggage car, and a passenger car.

The Illinois Central's 4-8-2 Mountains Series 2600 (built by the company itself at its Paducah workshops in 1942) complement the large locomotive projects that Machine Rail has had the opportunity to work on in recent years. Although these locomotives unfortunately no longer exist, we have put many hours of research and production work into this project so that the best experience could be achieved during its classic simulation in TSC.

This commission became much more special than it already was at the outset when the customer also requested two Pullman cars to compose the excursion version of the locomotive that was represented by locomotive 2613 in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The request included a baggage car and a class car, both represented in a single version of the ICRR, as there were many. The customer provided us with specific material to try to represent a particular moment in time.

The 3D mesh of these cars has been crafted with great attention to detail, which means that they are models with a high number of polygons, just like our other latest rolling stock and locomotives. In order for TSC to handle this in the best way possible, we worked on the mesh parts as child parts and LODs. Although the TSC platform is still the old Railworks that we have known for over 15 years, it still supports all of this satisfactorily today.

The interior of these cars during the day looks like it does in the screenshots above. They are a little dark due to the dynamic shadows produced by the game, and naturally the color of the interior parts contributes to this. But it is important to highlight a very important point about the interior lighting of these cars.

Cast Shadows

• This is how they look with the interior lights on. Remembering that these lights only turn on automatically at night, we decided to keep it that way, mainly because of the shadows cast. This makes everything more beautiful, but it directly impacts performance during the TSC simulation. Although it handles many features well, the graphics engine is still over 15 years old, which sometimes makes it poorly optimized for effects like this.

• To mitigate this, we will be providing a version of these lights on at night without Cast Shadows. It is an .RWP file named “No Cast Shadows” that you simply install using your Utilities. When you want the shadows active again, install the “With Cast Shadows” file. This is not a rule if your PC has a great graphics card, memory, and current generation CPU; you will rarely experience performance drops when you have the lights with shadows on.

More 1925 Heavyweight Pullmans

And for those who would like to wait more for the 1925 Heavyweight Pullmans, you can wait! We have already separated the entire project built from scratch on the baggage car and the class, so if time permits (later this year) we would like to build an exclusive package of these cars in a Standard configuration ready for repainting that will include more cars such as dining car, sleeping car, parlor car, etc. We will have plenty of time to talk more about this soon.

Repaint Kit

And speaking of repaints, the ICRR commission baggage car and class car are not ready for repaints, but Machine Rail will add a courtesy “repaint kit” only for Pullmans to the package.