I'm doing a catch up TRU Victoria to Hull next but I'll get this Burton route done after that all being well.
Super stuff!
On the Barrow Hill video and your captions about pathing etc, was Toton blocked or something at the time? We did quite a bit of wiggling between tracks and waiting for a route from Ratcliffe-on-Soar onwards, which all gave the impression of being a consequence of going via Derby causing there to be a lot of passenger workings to dodge. I was also a bit puzzled why we had to wait at Ratcliffe-on-Soar at all, since it's a full-on proper double track crossover and it's not obvious how the train crossing in front of us was in conflict.
Your scrolling caption comments about the cuttings at Belper and the choice of route rang a bell about it being a bit more complicated than that. I had a look around and found
http://www.derwentvalleymills.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/DVMWHS-Newsletter-2014-low-res.pdf which I know isn't where I found out about it originally, but it does give the outline of the story complete with a map of the routes that were considered, and also has a lot more stuff about that section of route and its rather fine listed structures from the perspective of electrification. Bit superficial but still an interesting read.
I watched this last night. I intended just to have a glance because usually the long videos look pretty bad when first uploaded. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this time the picture quality was good immediately. So, many thanks. As someone else posted earlier, railway routes often look quite different when viewed from the opposite direction and I found this to be the case here.
I'll record the video later today.
On this note I have found that it is better to download cab rides in webm format rather than mp4, when it is available (which it is at least for anything recent, including Don's). When the mp4 encoder starts to find the images too complex to encode all the detail without too much loss and still stay within the bit rate limit it's been told to keep to, it tries to save bits by encoding less detail on the parts of the image that don't move very much - which of course on a cab ride means the "vanishing point", right where you're most looking, and also means that it's losing detail in a spot which will always become successively magnified in subsequent frames as the train moves forward. This repeated magnification of the low-detail spot comes out as a succession of rings of blurriness that expand out of the vanishing point and whiz towards you at a rate of about three a second, which is most annoying.
The vp9 encoder youtube uses for webm videos, on the other hand, does its emergency-bit-saving by choosing bits of the image where there is lots of random detail close to the limit of resolution to skimp on, presumably on the basis that you're not going to see those bits too well in any case so it doesn't matter too much. On cab rides this means you start to get blurred patches in the tangliest tangles of twigs in the trees at the lineside, which is still a nuisance but is much less annoying than the "Time Tunnel" effect of the expanding rings that mp4 produces.
vp9 is also a more efficient encoder, so the webm files are roughly half the size or a bit over compared to mp4, as an extra bonus.
