the real deal

Drawings of the real steam locomotives are hard to come by. They are usually old, or have been lost, or incomplete, inaccurate, or over simplified. Whatever drawings that exist are usually guarded and “proprietary”, so there’s very little luck that you can get your hands on a complete set without knowing someone on the inside.

Perhaps a big attraction to the CK Holliday Plan Book is that you can get your hands on a fairly complete set of plans, based on a very popular engine, made in the same style as the “real deal” drawings.

So, once a complete set is up for grabs, I think it’s a pretty big deal, and I definitely want to let you know about it. This is a complete set of the Promontory locomotives. They are made available because these drawings were produced with public funds to construct the full-size replicas. So, indeed, this set is the real deal.

You can head over to the International Brotherhood of Live Steamers’ page to download your own copy. It comes in two parts, covering a staggering 786 sheets! In comparison, the CK Holliday Plan Book has about 100 sheets but some of them are text. And of course, that’s without the tender. (According to me, my Holliday model had about 3500 parts with 676 of them unique—again, without tender).

PS: The coding for the sim 1.0.2 update was 100% Unfortunately, during the update some bugs were introduced and prevented the sim from building/compiling, so it’s going to be a bit of a tedious work bug hunting/fixing some dependencies. But, yes. the good news is that the coding of new features is done and we’re almost ready to release the update!