Designing a LopoRail schematic — upload guidelines
Draw one clean-room side elevation per vehicle class. If it meets this spec it renders true to scale in every consist, and replaces the placeholder automatically.
1. What you are drawing
- A flat, technical SIDE elevation — straight on, no perspective, no scenery, no lighting.
- Buffers to buffers (coupling-cropped). One car per file.
- Original, clean-room work drawn from public facts — reference photographs for measurements only; never trace them.
2. Canvas and scale (the one hard rule)
- Width in pixels = real length in mm × 0.04. A 20 m car is 800 px; a 23 m coach is 920 px. Within ±2 px.
- Height: keep true scale too (roughly 150 px for a ~3.75 m vehicle); the width/height ratio must read as a shallow strip.
- Include width and height attributes (or a viewBox) so the scale can be checked.
3. Layers — name your groups
Name the groups so we can recolour and simplify them separately:
body, roof, window-band, doors, cab, bogie, wheel
4. Colour
- Flat fills only. Apply the operator livery: base (body), accent (waist band / warning panel), door colour.
- No gradients, filters, masks or blend effects.
5. Not allowed (stripped or rejected)
- Raster images, embedded bitmaps.
- Fonts or text — convert to outlines or omit.
- Scripts, event handlers, external references, filters, masks.
- Share-alike material (CC BY-SA, GPL, OpenTTD/Trainz), or anything traced from a photo, drawing or CAD.
- Files larger than 500 KB.
6. Operator logos
Keep any corporate logo in its own separate group. We hide it until a written licence is recorded, so you may simply leave it off — the drawing still ships with the livery.
7. Roles
Upload one file per role — e.g. "DMSO driving" and "Trailer" — so cabs land only on the driving cars of a multiple unit.
8. What happens on upload
Auto-moderation checks the file instantly: blocking errors (not an SVG, wrong width/scale, no shapes, too big) stop it; warnings (anything we strip, or a wrong-looking aspect) let it through but flag it. A human then approves or rejects it. On approval it goes live and you are credited.
9. Your credit
Approved contributions are credited, count toward your Consist Collection progress and badge, and give you a ready-to-post social share featuring the composition and the LopoRail brand.