Since the beginning of 2009 we have been making things in Garry’s Mod. I can’t remember the first thing I made, but it probably wasn’t very good. If you have played Gmod before you will know what I mean! There is quite a steep learning curve involved.

The first decent contraptions we made were spaceships. These were made using the help of Spacebuild, Life Support and Wiremod. Using Wire we were able to automate the life support, movement and doors of the ships. We decided our next challenge was to make a very large spaceship made of many sections. However, this didn’t go down too well due to a combination of the physics quirks in the source engine and our lack of knowledge on how to subdue said quirks. In the end we gave it up as a bad joke. Perhaps we will try again one day as, in retrospect, the task was quite possible.

Our next rencounter involved the construction of seagoing vessels. By this point, we had gained a fair bit of experience in building. I decided to pioneer an unusual (for Gmod) method of marine propulsion on my boat, by paddle wheel. Despite being told it would be impossible to do in Source, I developed a very accurate propulsion system comprising a pair of paddle wheels powered by two ‘motors’ each, which allowed change of direction using the paddle wheels alone. This system required very fine tolerances, but somehow I managed to pull it off.

The thing that convinced us on a subject for our next endeavour was an abundance of train tracks on many popular levels including gm_wireconstruct_rc and gm_mobenix_v3. Inspired by the original great railway builders, we set out to make trains and Wire systems to control them. Liam concentrated on creating conceptual designs, while my work was based on real life locomotives and carriages. We realised that it was necessary for our trains to employ de facto standards for them to be interoperable, and it was about this time that we decided that it would be a good idea to refine these standards and release them for the benefit of the whole community. And that’s why we made this site!

Let me elaborate on the standards we have adopted whilst building our trains. Firstly we decided on coupling. To our knowledge, there aren’t even any props made for coupling trains, never mind a system to automatically couple and uncouple the trains. Before we made a coupling system for our trains, the only way we could do it was by attaching rolling stock with rope, necessitating a trawl through the utilities menu to undo the rope every time we wanted to connect or disconnect stock. We are currently testing the third incarnation of our coupling system which allows the connecting of carriages from either end. Secondly, the coupling system would be useless if they were not mounted at the same height, so we have decided on a height to mount the systems at. Also, we have adopted a B-B wheel arrangement for general purposes, although I have tested B-B-B and B-2-B arrangements successfully on my locomotives.

This brings us to the end of my bloated introduction to the site. Well done if you made it this far, and in the months to come we will be releasing our train systems right here on this site, as well as documenting our general antics with Gmod.