Memories of Richard Trigaux:
Trains, from toy trains to virtual trains

I cannot say why I have always been fascinated by trains. Is it because of that first train journey before the age of three, which I evoke in my earliest memories? Does it come from a previous life? The most likely thing is that, at a time when we only had shabby wooden or printed sheet metal toys, the appearance of realistic miniature trains strongly touched one of my major life orientations: modeling.

In any case, as long as we were in Saint Dizier, until 1964, the trains were big black steam locomotives, and dark gray-green passenger cars, called DEV Forestier (From the name of the engineer who designed them during the war. However, they could only be manufactured after the Liberation, with the nationalization of the SNCF, to replace the destroyed or obsolete equipment of the former private companies). We were often seeing them, because we had to traverse a level crossing to go to town, or I was walking on a road along the track. From our building 1 we could also see the smokes very well and hear the whistles.

It was during one of these meetings that I was able to have a vision of a part of the connecting rod assembly, precise enough to be able to recognize it almost half a century later: the expansion link. See a little bit further.

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Date of first publication: December 2025

Date de last addition: none

These texts are a work in progress, a project spanning several years, so that they may contain missing parts and links to targets not yet created. Thanks to be patient. 🙂

 

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1965: a rapid transformation of trains in France

(Permalink) Added in March 2020

Until 1964, when we left for Algeria, the trains were black steam locomotives, gray-green Forestier DEV cars, and the adorable red and yellow railcars with the characteristic pimpon horns, often incorrectly called Michelines. When we returned, only three years later, the steam locomotives had disappeared. The trains were diesel or electric, and the Corail cars quickly replaced the Forestier cars. The Michelines lasted until around 1995, and often their local tracks were removed with them, unfortunately.

 

Why such a rapid transformation?

It is mainly due to the SNCF's desire to get rid of steam locomotives. It is known that these moving and frightening machines had a deplorable thermodynamic efficiency, consuming tons of coal per trip, a resource that France was beginning to run out of in 1960, with the foreseeable end of the known mines. Hence a huge program to build large dams (started at the beginning of the century, but which reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s), oil refineries, and unfortunately also nuclear power plants, the first of which began operating well before Valery first the radioactive. In fact, the decline of steam had begun in the USA only some years earlier, around 1955, for similar reasons. (Many steam locomotives in France were actually American, supplied with the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of France after the war)

The transformation of the SNCF was led at full speed by its then director, Louis Armand, who developed 50Hz electric traction, allowing the use of the ordinary electrical network, with a simple transformer (while DC required limited-power mercury rectifiers, and 16Hz expensive converters) It was a beautiful prediction, the proof is that this technique remains the standard today, and this throughout the world. At the time, in my child’s naivety, I was admiring this guy, as a champion of modernism and electricity. His dream was to electrify all the lines, something that was done only slowly. In the meantime, a generation of diesel locomotives replaced steam on the non-electrified lines. In fact, diesel was a much better deal, with electric only really winning out for the main lines and now high-speed trains. (Although in India the 1676mm gauge allows for very fast diesels)

 

If they pushed so hard to abandon steam, it was for several reasons.

🐜The first, well-known, is the low thermodynamic efficiency, particularly problematic in France with the imminent end of coal. This low efficiency is caused by the low temperature of the boilers: above approximately 400°C, the steam oxidizes the iron, causing rapid wear on the boilers. Metallurgy has never been able to solve this problem at an acceptable cost. Today we could do better, but it is now irrelevant.

 

 

There are however other lesser-known reasons:

🐺The need to vaporize water in an open circuit, an operation which consumes a lot of energy. Steam boats and power stations partly compensate for this problem, thanks to a condenser, which produces a pressure lower than the atmosphere. But this device is too bulky for a locomotive.

🐫The fact that it actually takes three people to drive a steam locomotive: a driver on each side, and the fireman or stoker (the one who keeps the fire going). While any other locomotive can run with a single driver. (In French, the term «chauffeur» (fireman) is improperly used for the driver of a car. But in a steam locomotive, the stoker is the one who maintains the fire, not the driver).

🐭Maintenance. For a one-day journey, several people will have to work all night, sweeping, cleaning, greasing, then restarting the fire, an operation which alone requires hours of work. Indeed, all these magnificent connecting rods are exposed to dust, which is equivalent to running a car without the oil pan. We can, but then we have to stop every 10km to clean and grease! For a steam locomotive, which runs more slowly, we can make a useful journey between two interventions, but on condition that we clean and re-grease each night. And this is exactly what locomotive depots were spending their time: cleaning, greasing, sweeping, descaling, disassemble the connecting rods to change wear rings, etc. It is understandable that countries where workers are well paid wanted to eliminate these expenses, and that countries where workers are paid peanuts were unable to do so before 2000 or even 2015.

🐀These maintenance constraints meant that steam locomotives could not be started instantly, to deal with an emergency or an unforeseen event. On the contrary, a diesel or an electric locomotive only takes some minutes to start. This is how British Railways replaced 50 steam locomotives with only 22 Deltic diesels! These two numbers reflect the proportion of time when steam locomotives are actually available: less than half the time.

🐭Track hammering. The vertical movement of the connecting rods produces a ramming effect, which moves the sleepers, packs the ballast, and moves the rails out of alignment. This requires a lot of maintenance for the tracks, another costly item. In some videos from the front, you can even see the locomotives slightly waddling! But a 100-ton monster waddling is a disaster for everything under.

🐨The coal smoke, abundantly laden with soot and dust, was very dirty. At my mother's house, at one time on rue Saint Sylve, behind the Toulouse train station, a ceiling collapsed, pouring out a quantity of soot that was left over from the steam locomotives era. Today, these huge black plumes and their filthy fallout would make local residents scream. Many structures along the railways have kept their epoch black color.

🐝The steam condensed on the buildings along the tracks, which in some cases caused damage. There were locomotives with condensers, for urban lines. But this bulky device never became widespread, only appearing when the law required it. The first metropolitan trains used the water reserve as a condenser, but it heated up quickly, making this system impractical.

🐮The presence of a large volume of pressurized and superheated water was very dangerous, and at the beginning of the trains there were boiler explosions, which automatically resulted in the death of the drivers. With the progress of metallurgy, complete explosions became rare, but there were still partial explosions at the level of the vault of the fireboxes, or leaks from the boilers during accidents or bullet impacts in war. The jets of superheated steam always caused serious burns to the drivers. Especially, the ceiling of the firebox was very vulnerable to lack of water, causing many accidents and requiring constant attention, including while running. The firebox opening into the driver's cab also allowed very dangerous flashbacks, for example in tunnels, causing burns or poisoning to the drivers.

Today, people who rebuild steam locomotives, for historical or folkloric reasons, learn at their expense that these machines are dangerous, with already several accidents due to non-compliance with the procedures, or even ignorance of the said procedures, forgotten with the death of the last drivers and engineers.

 

All these problems explain the SNCF's haste to end up with steam locomotives, to the point of scrapping the brand new improved locomotives that they yet just had ordered from their engineer André Chapelon. Which is a shame, because these machines represent in some way the apogee of steam... although they never actually ran. Some museums are trying to rebuild these machines.

 

And indeed, with diesel and electric engines, the transition was very rapid.

 

 

◀️ See this section in the page on Saint Dizier

Children's trains

 

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

I was able to buy my first train part when I was about ten years old, during one of my last stay in Nancy: the woman who was hosting me took me to a large toy store. At the time, department stores offered a fantastic assortment of trains: entire gondolas, wonderfully realistic and detailed, compared to the miserable soft plastic circuit that we still sometimes see today. The prices were also much more affordable (today model train is an expensive hobby). I chose the DEV baggage car, from the Jouef brand, in HO format (16.5mm). Why the van, if I remember correctly because I did not have enough pocket money to buy anything else. I kept it for several decades, chipped and mutilated of its buffers, to end up giving all my equipment to the Train Miniature Gaillacois, 43°55'38.80"N 1°54'15.07"E, where you can perhaps still see it today.

Of course other equipment followed, a motley collection of cars, a BB electric locomotive and a diesel (I was for the modern, so no steam) and rails, including two switches, that I would buy «chez Dupier» the toy store in Saint Dizier (which still exists today, although it has moved). My greatest desire was to create a permanent network, but I was never able to do it, between the always temporary accommodation and the «more important things». In Saint Dizier, I had no choice but to spread my rails on the floor in the living room, much to my father's displeasure, and also to my own, because it always had to be disassembled. And «tidied up»: a child's construction could only be «disorder».

 

In Béchar, I had a bedroom, but less desire to play with trains, due to the availability of the garden. However, I could have laid the tracks directly on the ground in the garden, and arranged ballast and embankments! But my mother opposed it, thinking that it would damage the equipment. My father bought a wooden plate, to mount the train in a fixed manner, under a kind of pergola. But the spirit was not there, and this work never really progressed: we knew that we would have to leave Algeria in 1967, at the end of the Evian agreements, and the network would not be able to follow.

 

Same problem in Mont de Marsan: a narrow house, but seven hectares of our own to do lots of other things.

Afterwards, it was student rooms, and the student protester’s milieu, where a «revolutionary» atmosphere reigned, hostile to such «bourgeois» leisure activities. So I decided to no longer devote my time to trains, but to my real great project of helping humanity to advance. However, my mother advised me to keep the train «for my children». Without really believing it, I listened to this curious advice, and so the train remained all this time in printed tin cake boxes like we still had in the 1950s (and probably from the period), except for a small track with a locomotive that I left on the edge of the chimney, during my Toulouse years (1977 to 1981).

And this is indeed what happened: the train came out of its boxes to amuse my children, at the time when they were forbidden to see me outside of the holidays, and I had to go and pick them up at the Faitg house of sorrow where they were deprived of any toy. But they were still too young for that, and it was only when I was able to free them (1997) that I was able to let them play with this train. We even bought some new elements, including the famous Cockerill crane by Jouef, which had fascinated me so much as a child. Since I was working at EREMS at the time, money was not so much a problem.

However, my children never really tried to do anything with this train. At the time, we were in my large apartment in Lavaur, and, by lack of making a large network, we could have made transportable modular elements, as all amateurs do today. I talked to them about it, I encouraged them, but it was not really their thing. Also, children grow up fast, and they have their own concerns. So, when they left and I emptied the apartment of what was left of them, I gave all my trains to the Train Miniature Gaillacois, 43°55'38.80"N 1°54'15.07"E.

 

◀️ See this section in the page on Saint Dizier

 

Virtual Trains: The Difficult Beginnings in Inworldz

 

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

However, it was not the end of trains for me. Indeed, virtual worlds allow us to make life-size virtual trains, in which you can really travel!

At the time, I was in Inworldz, a pioneer which had inherited the discontent of the absurd policies of Second Life, and also of the hyper-bugged simulation software of Open Sims. To the point that the founders had to disable physics, because it was crashing the simulators! So, when they finally debugged and reactivated physics in 2012, it was a big party! The sandbox was full of the weirdest physical objects, ball slides, gears, etc. like you see in books on the beginnings of virtual worlds.

I do not remember how I decided to make a train, it was probably just before Christmas. That year I had seen an exhibition of amateur trains in Marcillac, Aveyron, and there was a small piece of track in 400mm gauge, at a private home at the end of the Pont Rouge, which I found extremely cute, even more so than the real Decauville in 600mm. So I had settled on the 15" gauge (385mm), the smallest usable in practice, and I made a small network for the 2012 Christmas holidays in Inworldz!

Well, it was not easy, and the first tracks, physical cursors in slides made of «prims» (ready-made building blocks) did not worked at all: the trains were constantly derailing, at each change of prim. In addition, the prim tracks penalized the simulator (it took far too many prims). This was an intractable difficulty, so that I had to make do with making my train go around in circles, on a circular track, while the landscaped track under the woods, the station, the switches and the mine were only there as scenery, unusable.

It was only the following year that I was able to solve these problems, when Inworldz allowed for meshes, that is real 3D shapes. Indeed, the 2012 production had been noticed, and for Christmas 2013 I was offered a much larger location, where I was able to lay more than two kilometers of virtual tracks, in 600mm gauge! It was all the more interesting because I had made very pretty little steam locomotives, and which this time ran correctly on the mesh tracks!

However, in 2012, making meshes was not easy, unless you spent more than a month's salary on expensive software intended for cinema or advertising. And in Inworldz we were only exploring the free software available, such as Blender, Sketchup, Sculptris, which were just emerging. And I quickly understood that, even with Blender, making Mesh tracks would be an enormous and tedious job, and what's more, always to be redone, with the evolution of techniques. The solution I used then was to have collada files (a free mesh description format) made directly with a PHP script (a language running on a server, and allowing to create Internet pages according to parameters, or any kind of formats, including collada). Reverse-engineering something like a computer format, even readable by humans, is a formidable task, especially with the incomprehensible jargon of the Collada documentation. My expertise with VRML was useful to me in understanding these files: although they were totally different in their syntax and organization, they answered the same needs, and therefore they included the same functionalities. Just too bad that the books are so pedantic, using many specially invented expressions, without giving their definitions.

 

This time my tracks worked. Although I still had to face several problems:

- The mesh cursors on mesh track derailed in the turns. Probably a bug in the physics itself, which I could not hope to see solved for years. For this reason, on the advice of Jim Tarber, the main software developer of Inworldz, I had to go back to cursors in prims, and stick to it. (Added in 2018: I think the problem came from the fact that these cursors were physically rendered in «convex hull», that is to say that their hollows were filled, which obviously modified their behavior. I think that this is what Jim meant, but I did not knew these terms yet.)

-Of course I tried to couple wagons to my locomotives. It worked, but a camera bug made my wagons wiggle, ruining the visual effect. For this reason, I had to give up developing this function for several years. Worse, when changing simulators (the famous «sim crossing» so dreaded by Second Life residents) the coordination messages between locomotives and wagons no longer passed, which sometimes produced fantastic wagon ejections. When I had to empty the place after Christmas 2013, I found nearly ten of them buried all over the place.

-My switches were still makeshift contraptions with two track elements superimposed in the same location. But they worked! However, the scripts sometimes refused to work, because of a software inconsistency that I only understood two years later, and still by chance. This was serious, because when a train gets on the switch in the reverse way, that switch must be able to position itself automatically, otherwise it would cause a derailment. But it did not always worked before I found the solution to this script bug (two competing logical paths)

 

With these exceptions, during this Christmas 2013 I was still able to create a functional network, or more precisely two: a large one on 600mm track, which crossed several simulators, and a small one in 400mm which passed under tunnels, the whole in a snowy Christmas landscape. Here too this achievement was very noticed, and many people came to admire or play with it. The «big» train included a small black three-axle steam locomotive called «Cucaracha», with small «Forestier» style wagons and even the famous DEV baggage car which had been my very first train element. Well, they were simplified and adapted to the narrow gauge. The «small» train was more colorful, with funny little cars for Tinies (small anthropoid animal characters, very popular in the virtual worlds), which ran through different locations, including a «banana mine».

 

These were not the first virtual trains: in Second Life, Linden Lab had encouraged the creation of a vast network with dozens of kilometers of tracks, stations and factories. Made around 2005, it was in «prims» that is to say still very «toy» in appearance, compared to my much more realistic mesh creations. It did not even work with mesh tracks, but with a script which followed an invisible central primitive. But by 2008 the «moles», volunteer workers of Second Life, had finally abandoned and deserted this project, victims of the constant unpredictable and catastrophic changes in Linden Lab's policies. But if they had continued, their collective work would certainly have been much better than mine, at the same date. (Well, never with the SL simulator and SL physics, lol. My success came from using the much better Inworldz simulator)

 

A curious anecdote is that, one day when we were a group of several people, one of the small 400mm steam locomotives (the red one, called «Wooty») derailed at full speed, and went into the neighboring plots, to end its journey in... a manger! It was so obvious that we all went to see the curious scene of the locomotive-magus, and I made a serious-humorous remark of circumstance: «The message of God is addressed to everyone, including to locomotives».

 

 

Virtual Trains: success in Inworldz (2010-2018)

 

(Permalink) Written in November 2016.

For Christmas 2014, I was given an entire region, where I installed a more complex network. No «region crossing», but no way to make tunnels with the «system ground» either. The traditional solution was to build a cover using prims, but it did not looked very good. Moreover, modifying this floor, «terraforming», was very difficult: the data was stored with a jpg-type compression, so each time the floor was modified, it started to «fry», that is to say to deform irregularly, sometimes quite far from the work point, resulting in unpredictable irregularities and spikes.

So this time, I resorted to an innovative solution: I lowered the system floor to the minimum, to get rid of it, and I made a floor entirely in mesh. For that price, I was able to create my tunnels, and have them go under a infinitely more realistic hill than the toy mountains you see everywhere in Second Life.

Here too, I had a track which went around the sim, plus a side track and branches, and of course a train station. I had tunnels of different styles: modern, mine, cut stone, rock. One room in the mine was big enough to hold a ball, while one of the tracks led to a new version of the «banana mine». This achievement can be seen on Youtube: Model Train narrow gauge Winterfest 2014 and InWorldz Winterfest 2014.

 

Written in November 2018.

In 2015 came a novelty, this time a metric gauge railcar, that is to say a «real» train: Model Train: Metric gauge in Inworldz winter gala 2015. There was actually a second one, this time in a more spring-like landscape: Model Trains in Inworldz ICE 2015

2016 was less productive, with a narrow gauge winter landscape, an element of which can be seen here: InWorldz Winter Fest 2016

In 2017, the Relay for Life of Inworldz asked me for a metric gauge track connecting four regions, with automatic stops: Relay For Life train, 2018 in Inworldz. See also, in several places: Prim Perfect, the Relay for Life, which also shows a London bus animated by me.

Then came for the fall festival a production crossing five regions, with automatic stops: Inworldz Fall Fest 2017. Unfortunately it was for Halloween, so we see stuff like that. But we also see an industrial robot, the kind of thing I was developing.

2018 was an apotheosis, with a production on only two regions, but through an elven village and a fantasy zoo (Whimsical zoo) by friends: InWorldz Elf Village & Train 2018. This time the underground part is particularly interesting, with a novelty: the switches remote-controlled by HTML links («Internet of Things»)

 

 

Then came the end of Inworldz... a huge disaster, which destroyed so many beautiful things, in the most beautiful virtual world. Forced to retreat into the bugged Open Sims, I had to give up the dream of trains for a while. But the future is being prepared in other places. Let us wait.

I also continue to slowly develop the steam locomotive «Mahakali» (visible in the InWorldz Elf Village & Train 2018 video), with animated connecting rods and everything. Originally intended for inworldz, it will not have been completed before the end. But the representation of the wrathful deity «Mahakali» (imaginary counterpart of Mahakala, not to be confused with the Hindu Mahakali) had another function: to drive out the «demons» of Inworldz (the mismanagement by the only remaining founder). This unfortunately could not avoid the irreparable: the loss of more than ten years of artistic creations and community creation.

 

 

to be continued!