My focus

My interest is simply "how complex things work". Not just any complex things, but things that either seem important to me for some reason, or exhibit some aesthetic attraction on myself.

In practical terms, and as far as railway simulation is concerned, this means the following.

Steam engines show how they work to a larger extend than other traction systems. Also, this traction poses much bigger challenges to the engine designer than other tractions. At least that is my view, and for sure, there is more to see in steam engines.

Route design in the prototype means finding a compromise between desired connections, existing geography, financial constraints on the investment, and economic background of the region defining the amount and type of traffic on the route.

The time starting at the dawn of industrial age greatly influences our lives and what you learn in school is but a few crumbs of the cake. Railways were at the heart of the development for most of that time, and where they were not, the developments influenced the railways, e.g., by shaping traffic patterns.

Railways were among the first technical systems which raised attention for the fields of safety, resource management, and public infrastructure policies. They were not the only ones, but dealing with railway history means dealing with the development in these still hot areas.

Dealing with railways in different countries draws your attention to differences in the economic, geographic, social, political background.

Now, if you deal with railway history, you automatically get all these interesting things served on a silver plate for you. How boring was the geography lesson when we had to learn the names of the rock material of an endless list of mountains in an endless list of countries no one wanted to know about anyway. But if you are attracted by a certain railway line, you start asking why they built this bridge that way and that tunnel at that location, and you plunge into complex background that you would never want to know otherwise. I myself am not a bookworm just for the fun of reading books. I want to process the stuff I read, I need to digest it or it explodes my head. I would feel very bad about just stuffing it all into my memory and letting it rot there.

This is where simulation comes at my rescue, which is the topic of the next article.

On a pragmatic level, I think that today's computers are well suited for simulating and rendering machinery and buildings. In the future, they might also be up to modelling natural things like plants, but for the moment, you need to compromise in this field. I am also interested in simulating plants and animals, as well as human behaviour throughout the ages, but this will have to wait for a decade or two.