Peco Plan 2: BR Branch Line - Metcalfe vs Peco

A slight diversion, I recently finished building the platforms and station building using the Metcalfe N gauge card kits for my Peco Plan 2 layout.

However, the station building was bloody massive. Definitely overscale, and too big in any event.

  

 

No room around the back, and not enough room on the platform. Oh well. I can save it away for another layout perhaps.

 

So I set about finding a replacement - the Peco plan suggested using their own naturally, so I gave that a shot.

 

 

 

Much better I feel - and I have space on the platform for some outdoor shelter/canopy with some seats. The kit itself was perhaps easier to build than the Metcalfe also. Naturally I'll need to weather both it and the platform to make the differences in brick colour less noticeable but I'm happy for now.
 

Testing FS2004

So having got my XP machine all set up and running, it was time to install FS2004 and see what it ran like; first of all I needed to update it using the 9.1 patch, and then to make life easier, apply the No-CD patch too.

Next I set about installing the following addons to start with:

• FSUIPC
• FSPassengers
• FSNavigator
• ActiveCamera
• MyTraffic 2006

I then went about trying to find another program from this era; Nvidia Profile Inspector. I found it was still being updated until fairly recently, but all of the versions on GitHub refused to run in Windows XP, complaining they weren't a 32 bit program. So I had to do some digging to find an older version... this took a while. None of the usual sites had old versions or links that worked (Guru3D, Techspot, TechPowerUp, MajorGeeks, etc). So I had to go trawling through the wayback machine to find the old website, and version 1.9.7.1.

This worked a charm as can be seen below - 

My settings for the profile are pretty simple:

 

And the result is shown below: 

This is running at 1280 x 1024 (to match my monitor when it arrives), 40% traffic setting, running at 4x speed with basically all settings maxed out. Though note, this is before installing any further scenery or airport addons.

Still, pretty good for barely any cost. I suspect FSX would only give me 15-20 fps on the same hardware, if that, for basically no improvements.