N&W Class A 2-6-6-4

The finest of the fleet, this was Norfolk & Western's premiere fast freight engine.  Many consider the A to be the best steam engine ever built, and one can understand why N&W held onto steam longer than any other Class 1 U.S. Railroad.

I wanted to craft a Class A to complete my trilogy of N&W steam; I started by doing a Class J skin for the default Northern, which with some mod help from Bombardiere (Kimmo Jaske) became a stand-alone engine.  Second, I did a Y6 2-8-8-2, providing the skin while Bombardiere did the rest.  In the months after that, I learned a lot about hex editing and the mod process, and decided to do an engine all on my own.  The A, though, was going to be a tough nut to crack.

I started with the Red Devil's body, as it had the right cab, a long boiler, and it also happened to have a tender that looked right.  To this, I tried adding the Challenger's front truck.  What I saw was promising, but there were issues; the long boiler was not long enough, and to get the wheels to fit I'd have to use the drivers from some other engine.  But what was really needed was a way to edit the .3DP file directly, to move points (think corners) of the model around in space.

I figured out how to do this manually; basically, if you want to move a wheel forward by 1 unit, then all you gotta do is subtract 1.0 from the converted floating point value of each Y coordinate.  I won't explain the process further, it is described on my web page (http://wpandp.com/CarModHowTo.html), but I will say that this is a tedious process, expecially if you get ambitious like me and take on a complex steam locomotive like this!

I ended up making numerous small changes to the loco body, to truck1, and to the tender, too many to fully recount.  There's plenty more that could still be done.  I'm releasing this now as a "good enough" version, though I may later re-release after doing further tweaking.

INSTRUCTIONS:

DOWNLOAD THE CLASS A 2-6-6-4 - as ZIP file, you must unzip and then place the PK4 file in "UserExtraContent", the rest into "EngineTypes"

I am interested in your feedback, especially via Hawk's Forum. 
(http://hawkdawg.com/forums/index.php)

Let me know if you think the engine specs or cost or whatnot need to be changed; I tried to fit this within the scale of engines already in the game as well as be true to the original engine's primary function (fast freight).

- Michael Rountree
wpandp.com