The Pacific & American Railroad utilizes the same physics standards that have been developed for vNERR. The virtual North Eastern Railroad is the oldest virtual railroad in operation today. These standards were developed to provide the NERR fleet of locomotives and rolling stock with the most realistic handling characteristics and esthetics possible within the constraints of MSTS and our own technical abilities.

Each car and locomotive entering our shops is converted to the following standards before it is placed in regular service on the Pacific & American Railroad.

  (1) IDENTIFICATION

• Filenames for .WAG, .ENG, .SD, and .S files will be identical in terms of both spelling and case.
• Filenames will begin with PA for Non-Locomotive equipment followed by car type and the car number. Example: PAbox_54321.
• Locomotive Filenames will begin with PA_ followed by the locomotive type and number. Example: PA_F7A_123.
• Filenames of Non-Drivable versions of P&A locomotives will begin with AI_. Example: AI_PA_F7A_123.

  (2) PHYSICS

• Coupler break values are set to 5.1e7N.
• Bounding Boxes and Inertia Tensors are adjusted to the dimensions of the individual WAG or ENG. We use Robert K. Guy's BBoxEdit ver 1.2 program to assist in making bounding box and inertia tensor corrections.
• Mass in Metric Tonnes is adjusted to provide both loaded and empty versions of each car.
• DerailRailForce is set to 2.5 x Mass.
• DerailBufferForce is adjusted to take into account the type of car and the mass.
• Friction data is calculated using Joseph T. Realmuto's FCalc 1.0 program for both loaded and empty .WAG files.
• Certain .S shape files with blurry textures are edited manually to correct the texture values.

  (3) LIGHTING

• Lighting is modified, as necessary, to enhance each individual car or locomotive.
• AI headlights and other easily identifiable AI lighting are added to each locomotive.
• Working and AI FRED lighting is added to all applicable .WAG or ENG files.

  (4) BRAKES

• Brake settings on all .ENG and .WAG files are set to Scott Borchardt's (a.k.a. Wurger) LocoPhysics 3.1 standard.
• MaxBrakeForce is calculated by converting Metric Tonnes of the empty car to KiloNewtons (MASS * 9.8065) and multiplying by 10%.

  (5) CABVIEWS AND SOUND

• All locomotives are aliased using the default cabs/sounds or the Common.Cab and Common.Snd convention.

  (6) NON-DRIVABLE AI LOCOMOTIVES

• Each drivable P&A locomotive has a corresponding Non-drivable AI version included in the locomotive folder. These are created after all adjustments and modifications have been made. A copy of the drivable locomotive .ENG file is made and the Cabview and Headout lines are deleted. In addition, they are aliased to an AI eng.sms file for a slightly different sound.

  (7) Front Coupler Issues

• An additional entry has been made to appropriate wag and eng files to help with the front coupler bug in MSTS. This pice of code has been added to all rolling stock and small engines that would use their front coupler for switching purposes.