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Once the structure was finally ready, I was able to begin installing the tracks. Initially, after laying the tracks for the first hidden station on level 0 following the computer-generated design, I temporarily "closed" the track on level 0 to test iTrain's features and understand the issues I still had to deal with regarding how to define and manage the blocks. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but since it was the first purely digital application I had created, I was afraid of making mistakes.
The first tests I did with iTrain blew me away. I had never imagined it would be so simple and yet so effective to control trains in automatic mode. The trains stopped at the station on the right track, perfectly and progressively, just like in real life.
The following images show the evolution of construction over time in the period from 10 September 2021 to 19 May 2022 and therefore summarise approximately 8 months of work: after 8 months from the laying of the first track, the route was practically complete except for a couple of optimisations made later.
Laying the tracks, however complex and detailed, was only the tip of the iceberg of the work required to build the layout. Creating the landscape was the activity that occupied me from May 2022 to February 2026. I must say that having dedicated only a fraction of my free time to this activity after dinner and/or on weekends, if I had worked more assiduously and regularly, I could have completed the whole thing much faster. In fact, between 2022 and 2026, entire months passed without me dedicating a single hour to developing the layout, but this is a hobby, so what's the rush?
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