Elastic tracks
I would like to suggest a feature to help designing railroads: elastic tracks.
There would be three kinds of elastic tracks: straight and curved.
A straight elastic track would be connected to other tracks of the railroads, and when one of those tracks are moved, the length of the elastic track would adjust automatically.
A curved elastic track would have it’s curve radius specified (there could be one kind per curve radius available in the current library catalog), and when one of the connected tracks is moved, the angle of the elastic curved track would adjust automatically.
A straight elastic track can be connected to curved elastic tracks, and curved elastic tracks can be connected between themselves, if not of the same radius or in the same orientation.
The creation of an elastic track could be done in the UI as setting a flag on a given track (this would make the selection of curve radius for elastic track easy since implicit).
The flexible track could also be set as elastic, so that moving connected tracks would readjust the flexible rail.
Of course, if several elastic tracks are connected to the tracks being moved, they adjust simultaneously, while constraining the places where the track can be moved.
To disconnect an elastic rail, the user would have to move it, instead of moving the connected rails.
Finally, a command would let us replace the selected elastic rails by normal library rails, as with the Close Gap with Track command, with an option to leave a chunk of elastic rail if the gap is too large, or to Shorten a Track.
Pictures with examples can be found at: ftp://ftp.informatimago.com/users/pjb/railmodeller/elastic-tracks.tar.bz2
Not currently planned
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Nico commented
This would be a nice addition