 I'm happy to introduce a terrific session now called Beginning to Understand Liverpool and Manchester Railway. And our speaker is Graham Mills. Mr. Mills is a semi-retired university academic with a long-standing interest in education-related applications of OpenSim. And welcome, Graham. I'm going to turn the mic over to you. Thanks very much. I hope everybody can hear me okay. And many thanks to Avocon for organizing the conference and for make, for introducing me and bringing everything together. I talked briefly on this subject last year. It's a subject that fascinates me clearly. It's very much a personal project and one that I'm interested in pursuing, basically because I live in Liverpool. The other end of the line in Manchester, there's a kind of symbiotic relationship between these two cities. And it goes back a long way now, back to 1830, when a railway line was built between them. Liverpool, if you know, is in the northwest of England and it's a major sea port. And it basically served as the point of import for things like cotton, for example, which were transported by the railway to Manchester. It was so much more effective than the sort of use of roads, which were very poor in those days, and canals, which were much slower. Manchester was the centre of the cotton manufacture weaving in those days. And the two lived very much, as I say, in symbiosis. And along the way, there were lots of collieries that opened. So the whole thing was being fuelled. It's a fascinating time politically, socially and economically. So what I'm trying to do is to develop a sort of topographical model of the railway. I talked last time about One Station, which we'll look at in a moment, but I'm basically extending this out along the line to Manchester. And the reason for being interested in this is also because a lot of people regard the Liverpool and Manchester railway as the first modern railway. It's the first time that all the elements of modern rail travel were bought together in one place. On the other hand, its lifespan was actually quite short. It was so successful that basically the whole thing mushroomed the railway, although it still exists. But it was merged into much larger organisations. So there's a very limited visual record simply because it lasted in its original form for such a short period of time. There are some maps, a few plans. And I'm going to be speaking mainly about artwork. And I will be taking you on a notional journey from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830 or thereabouts and introducing some of the places and events that took place and some of the structures that were built along the line. In particular, I'll be talking about the Rainhill Trials. These determined that locomotives were actually the way to go. They were held really close to the actual opening. Even at that stage, they weren't quite sure how they were actually going to move goods and passengers along the line. We're going to talk about something that they actually didn't think was terribly important. The evolution of stopping places, what we now regard as intermediate stations on the line. They were very interested just in Manchester and Liverpool, everywhere else in between, not so much. I have to say some caveats to start with. I'm neither an engineer nor a historian. I might sort of make claim to being a hobby historian now. And much of what I've done is basically scratch modeling. So using basic building and scripting skills. And what I would kind of say to you is that basically if I can do this, then it should be accessible perhaps on different topics to other people as well. So there's nothing earth-shattering about what I've done. In terms of the actual extent of the build at the moment, I guess there are about ten levels. So there's a ground-terrain aspect to it. And then some nine-sky platforms, which will take you all the way to Manchester. That's by no means complete, so there's quite a long way still to go. When it comes to interpreting the artwork, it's actually quite a complex problem because the railway as such was very much in flux around this time. When it opened, it wasn't finished. It was very much experimental. They didn't quite know how things were working. There was nothing to base their decisions on. When you actually look at the limitations, some artists doubtlessly used artistic license. Some images became reversed during the copying process. We know relatively little about the true colour of what we were looking at. This is ten years before there was any even black-and-white photography. We know nothing about the elevation of many of the buildings that we can see on maps. And we know very little detail about the terrain as it was then. So all I can say is that what we have is a working hypothesis. When I show you some of what I've built, you'll occasionally see things highlighted in red. These are anomalies that are shown in some artwork but not in others. I have tried to stay to as far as possible real-world dimensions. This becomes difficult when you're talking about buildings because the normal avatar size, and we so easily forget this, is way in advance of two metres. So as a consequence with buildings, it helps to be able to build the elevation is a little bit stretched. But when it comes to the actual railway and the locomotives and carriages, these are relatively built to scale. And I actually operate with a reduced size avatar. Oh sorry, one too many. I hope you're seeing now the Liverpool Crown Street Station. This was the terminus in Liverpool. And you can see a now and then view of the area. It's now a public park. You can see in the public park at the top there a large ventilation shaft. Okay. And if you go back to 1830, the building in the middle there is the actual station. And this is what the artists all drew and painted, this view looking at the station and the tunnel beyond that was the start of the line. But there were a whole lot of other buildings that we can see on maps. And some of them we can make guesses at as to their appearance based on other records. So for example, we now know that there is an entrance building. And it's quite likely that this in fact was where the train crews who had to overnight in Liverpool before going back to Manchester were put up. If we look at the extreme right, we can see that there's a windmill. And the windmill persisted for a good few years, despite the presence of this very busy station and works alongside. And it actually supplied water. It's acted as a pump source for water for the station. You've got to remember this station was right on the outskirts of the city. It was very poor infrastructure to start with. And this kind of aspect that I think opens them is really good for integration and making you think about the various aspects. So now if we look back at the park, we can see the ventilation shaft. This actually is for another tunnel which runs under the original station. It was added so that locomotives could work the tunnel subsequently, but much later. But we can also see to the left of the station area that there is a goods area. And beyond that, there is actually a works. And that is where they built the carriages and wagons for the railway. So there's a lot there that we don't really understand and need to study in more detail. But now moving on on our journey. Oh sorry, one last thing I forgot to say in the previous slide is that just beyond the station, the only other significant institution in the area was the Botanic Gardens. This had opened in 1803. It was just adjacent to the station. And of course as soon as the station moved there, the works and so forth, there was a lot of pollution and as a consequence the Botanic Gardens had to move on. But in terms of the build, it's a very interesting contrast with the station next door. So that's been a slight detail for me. So if we go about eight miles along the track towards Manchester, we arrive at a village called Rain Hill. And this was the location for the locomotive trials in 1829. And the big question they needed to answer was were they going to use locomotives at that stage or were they going to use fixed stationery engines and basically rope haul, there would be about 31 of these one per mile, basically rope hauling groups of carriages along this railway. So history could have taken a very interesting turn at that stage, but fortunately that didn't happen. There were people who very sincerely believed in locomotives and the Rain Hill trials were a major success for them. But the Rain Hill trials are somewhat misunderstood in terms of their topography. One thing that Rain Hill is known for is this skew bridge, which is a sort of very acute angle, took a turnpike across the railway. And people locate the grandstand that the dignitary sat at. There are some 10,000 people that came to see the trials. They locate that next to the bridge. But we know in fact that the grandstand of the bridge was some quarter of a mile, 400 meters or thereabouts apart because they were used as timing locations. There were posts there where people were taking interval times. So this very common model, which you'll often see, is not likely to be correct. There is a second French illustration, which is probably also a reconstruction, but is more likely, I suspect, to reflect what is actually happening. So here again, we're now looking north and the grandstand is immediately to our left. And you can see that there is a workshop there, a tent for refreshments, as well as the track. And if we just go on to the next slide, hopefully what you can see is the skew bridge there right at the extreme right and on the left, the sheds in the grandstand, now 400 meters from the bridge. So you can see that the French illustration is likely probably a reconstruction, but it fits much better with what we know about the location of all the elements. In terms of the actual contenders, there were three engines that were involved. So the most famous one is the yellow one, which is Rocket. We have Saint-Pois, which is the green one. And the one that looks like a tea trolley is novelty. And novelty was the crowd favorite, because you look so cool just standing on novelty and going along. All the others had to try much harder. So on from Rain Hill, now we have early stations. There's a station called Collins Green, which didn't survive for very long. But what we see there is something we see on maps also in other locations. And that is that the early stations evolved from stopping places, basically where there was a level crossing. So there was a road and this needed to be a point that was manned. And in many cases, they needed to provide accommodation to the gatekeeper who was responsible for organizing, for maintaining the safe operation of the railway. And this is where people came because they came to get onto the trains and got off the trains because there was a member of staff there they could stop the train. And this allows us to make certain guesses as to the way in which stations evolved. So here we have our octagonal cottage, as it were. And we have the yellow areas here, which will appear the bay at the front may have been the sort of first place that passengers colonized. And then the heated area on the left may be extended into that region. Okay, so that's my hypothesis that the front bay evolved into the waiting room because there was nowhere basically for passengers to go. So I just want to end with one final station, one final feature, and this is the Sanky Viaduct. It's now a great one listed Viaduct. It dates all the way back to 1830, but it's still used. It was over-engineered basically. It is 60 feet high and was able to take the ships, the mercy flats as they were called, the barges carrying goods under the railway arches. So it went over the Sanky River and the canal. And I'll just end by hopefully giving you a demonstration of that. And here we can see in all its glory three of the nine arches of the Sanky Viaduct and indeed one of the barges, roughly to scale. So I'm just going to skip over a couple of slides and merely end by thanking everybody for basically providing an absolutely wonderful tool for studying historical sites such as the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Being able to build affordably on this kind of scale is fantastic. Things like blogging and Twitter are very useful, accessory tools. And I just want to end by acknowledging the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Trust, who do a lot to provide background information on this kind of thing. And then of course the OpenSim viewer and content developers and the service providers that make this such a great community. Okay. Apologies for probably overrunning a little bit. And thank you very much. Graham, thank you. Wow. That was a fantastic presentation and showing us literally how OpenSimulator can be used for historical recreations. There's so much we can do with that and I hope more and more people take advantage of that. So thank you very much, Graham. And I want to encourage everyone here to visit our OSCC 17 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations like this one and explore the hypergrid too. There's hypergrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all the OSCC Expo region. So make sure to stop by each one of them. Our next session is going to begin at 8.30 a.m. and it's going to be OpenSimulator Statistics. So stay tuned and we will see you here at 8.30.