TTOS Episode 8 Production Log (1/10/25)

A big plot point in Episode 8 is that The Fat Controller visits every place on the island starting with "Balla"

This gives us 5 sets that we have to make

• Ballahoo (A goods yard, not yet started)

• Ballamoddey (A Mid Sodor Railway station)

• Balladrine (The haunted station from the 2023 Halloween Special)

• Balladwail (A seaside town, not connected by rail, partial progress)

and, of course,

• Ballaswein (The Northern most town on the island, where Toby will be located, not yet started)

Over the past week, I've completed 2 sets, and started a third, namely Ballamoddey and Balladrine (You can see the sets posted above)

Ballamoddey was completed in a lightning fast 6 hours straight, whereas Balladrine underwent a few design changes that ended up taking around a full day

Ballamoddey was based off of Waunfawr on the Welsh Highland Railway. I used clam1952's "Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland 2014 TANE" route (Available on the DLS!) as reference when making it, even so much as using the Waunfawr station building.

I took some liberties when making Ballamoddey, adding a goods yard that will be important for the scene the station shows up in (We'll talk more about it in a coming production log!)

Looking at the surrounding area, there's a lot of mountains near Waunfawr, so it was something that I adapted onto the route, having Ballamoddey be nestled in a valley next to some farmlands.

I finished up the texturing, added a few houses, and the route was done! All in about 6 hours :)Next, I wanted to work on Balladrine. Balladrine is a very ominous station, something that I've always had in my mind as kind of being in the middle of nowhere. No trees, no tracks other than the 3 track mainline, no buildings, just... an expanse of grass for miles.

Balladrine underwent a lot of different production ideas. We first started the route off as just a normal station.

We developed it a bit further, adding some more farmlands and some trees, just to pretty up the area.

I showed it to some folks on call, and a lot of them said they had different ideas on what Balladrine actually looked like

Sadly, I never took pictures of any of the ideas, but we tried surrounding the station in steep cliffs, having dark trees just over the horizon line to encircle the entire baseboard, and even just... leaving it as a flat baseplate with no textures.

Eventually, LoganDrawsStuff, the voice actor for Toby, suggested leaving a perfectly circular cutting in the trees to encompass the station. I immediately thought of a standing stones circle. So, I added 10 stones to encircle the station.

Mango has yet to modify their Wellsworth station building into Balladrine, but the route is just about complete otherwise!

The third route I've been working on is Balladwail, namely the cliffs near the town. This area is meant to be cinematic, and intense, using a lot of lighting tricks as well as the CVW Advanced Cam to make the scene seem a lot more dramatic than it actually is.It's really hard to make good looking cliffs in Trainz. No matter how you try it, it'll always look... really awkward. That said, I've been trying my best. The progress so far has been alright, and I'm pretty confident that it'll look somewhat passable once the product is fully complete, and we're filming in TRS22.We've got some more things that we've completed in the background, but we'll be showing those next week! Hopefully more of the routes are done by then.

Thanks for reading!

- Andria