Praises

[ChristineR]

  Guys and gals, what a mind blowing piece of work you have all created here. Tried this out in late October of 2020 and I was stunned at the creativity and imagination I have seen. Wonderful just wonderful!

Now for the public announcement ...
Are you ready? You can't click and change the channel because I own it.

Now I have your attention, and I tried to find out where Simutrans is located to send flowers, but I could not and the local Flower people here tell me It would cost more than I have,. SO here we go all of the buttering up is done.. Did it work? I hope so.
1. how about a way to park trains without the No Route banner?
2. How do I add Direct X models to a add on?  Yea,, so it Dates me a bit (( but I share models DirectX and I have conversion tools and graphics are mostly *.DDS and I have a conversion tool for that too! )) Most were made for various games but some good buildings in the mix, and tons of sound files.

Mostly I have started a little thing of recreating Train lines in my Current State of Oregon USA, in Simutrans it is beautiful, and yes we still use Trolleys and short rail (N track) here.
OK there are about 7 gigs of direct X models with accompanying graphic files *.DDS and 2+ gigs and probably a lot more if I look, this computer I made in the 70's is very old, and has seen many reincarnations and now is a diehard windows7 i HATE WIN10 SPYING,

My reason? Well lets see.. none of my children are interested in computers, the local Community Collage has Idiots teaching how to use Microsoft Word and call it advanced computer training. (PS Microsoft is paying the College to do this). Plus today and hopefully tomorrow I am 71, I never in a million years thought I would ever get this old. Doctors said I would die at 40,, They are now dead! Good riddance to creeps scaring a girl like that, and with ,,, Ahh lets see here. we have
Drive C:  1.81 TB
Drive E: 1.81 TB
Drive F: 7.27 TB
Drive K: 7.27 TB
Plus my HP Laptop running Windows 8. The only metal one made back when Henry Ford made the first Automobile
And a Windows 8.1 box
My health is crap. so whats new in your life?

[Leartin]

1. how about a way to park trains without the No Route banner?

If the train contains at least one wagon that has a capacity, you can set it to wait for 100% load. Since it won't be loaded, it won't try to move to the next station and will never check whether it could, so won't find out there is no route.
It's possible to create invisible platforms and an invisible locomotive such that it looks like a bunch of wagons are just parked on a blank track with this trick.

2. How do I add Direct X models to a add on?

Simutrans requires images in png format. Any kind of 3D model just needs to be rendered as 2D raster images in othographic projection from the right angle. Those 2D images then might need some cleanup (removing unintentional special colors, cutting them up if they are larger than a single tile), which can be done manually or with tools like Shades and Tilecutter (https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php/topic,20149.0.html). - for buildings, Tilecutter is especially nice, since it already gives you a barebone dat-file. The dat-file contains all information about the objects, eg. for a citybuilding a name, when it's allowed to spawn, how many people work/live there etc. If you look at the repositories of the paksets - eg. for pak64 (https://sourceforge.net/p/simutrans/code/HEAD/tree/pak64/), I think the general idea becomes clear quite quickly - it's usually easier to start by copying what's already there. When you have both a graphic and a dat file, you need to combine them with makeobj (https://sourceforge.net/projects/simutrans/files/makeobj/). Makeobj is a command line tool - for most new users that's something they have not encountered before, but I trust that you remember a pre-gui-computer era and can deal with it

Now of course this is just rudimentary "where to start" and I don't expect you to be productive from just that. I guess my first attempt, in your shoes, would be to try and bring your files into blender (https://www.blender.org/). As far as I know, that should open DirectX models, but I'm not sure how well that works. pak128.britain has public blend files for comparison (https://github.com/JamesHood/pak128.Britain-blend-files) and there is a script for automatically placing a lightsource and rendering in the perspective/angles Simutrans needs (http://bridgewater-brunel.me.uk/downloads/render_SimutransRender_pak128Britain-65.py). Since I don't work in 3D, I can't be of much help with all that, though.
I think you shouldn't concern yourself too much with what comes after - that can be dealt with once you have usable png images. Perhaps it's enough work for one person to bring what you have into a blender format, and it makes more sense if others could render them out for the various paksets. Assuming your models might be american-centric TheRoadmaster1996 (https://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?action=profile;u=12093) seems like a candidate for such a task, since he is currently working on an american-themed pakset. (No, this has nothing to do with you being 71 years old and claiming your health is crap, such that 7 gigs of material could be lost any day, why do you ask?)

Phew... hope I don't get flagged as spam with that many links...

[ChristineR]

Simutrans requires images in png format.

That should be easy I think I have not lost my old image converts, just not sure they can handle *.DDS files because of the image layers used in them.

I trust that you remember a pre-gui-computer era and can deal with it

That's funny I started programming at DOS3.0 helping make the Gorilla game. Prior to that my brother bought a Atari Computer that you plugged into your TV and wrote code on to a Cassette tape.

2D raster image

Your kidding! Right? I have not heard of that for years and years.

Thanks for the tip on the Stationary Trains that helps.. Now I need to get a few Dam's converted to Simutrans so I can place them in the Columbia River.
And why do I ask? Thinking about 50 years of programs, manuals, software you can't get for at least the last 30 years. There is no one in this town of 11 thousand that has a clue what a computer can do and they all come to me to fix, repair, upgrade, etc for them.  And there is not one I would give this treasure trove to that would have a clue what it is or what it does. even on my husbands side, everyone is a rancher or a farmer, if you know what I am saying,.

I was really in hopes of a DLL fork that a out side program could access.