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  • in reply to: Industry and carrying goods by train #11753
    atpat
    Participant

    I think the balance between two supplying factories will depend on the total journey time from factory to industrial building in the town, won’t it? If both factories are delivering to the same goods station then it will come down to the line frequencies, and you would expect the fastest delivery to win in the end.

    Bastagre: for platforms divided into two (A/B sides – some UK stations use this arrangement too, for example York P5a/5b, but not in that case with simultaneous, opposite arrivals and departures), just place two stations end-to-end! A junction between wouldn’t work without enough space though.

    in reply to: gridlock .. again #11240
    atpat
    Participant

    I’ve seen this too, but the cause is not always obvious. I find typically that one vehicle wants to make a manoeuvre which conflicts, and it halts, and everything around it gets stuck. Working out which one is a challenge. The ‘asleep’ cars, I observe, are often waiting to do a u-turn but can’t because of the other traffic.  Sometimes they do seem just to go to sleep, though!

    I tried the cobra tram last night and it just got stuck in the (large) tram station, tangled up on entry/exit. The vehicle interactions are too strict and need to be relaxed.

    in reply to: Time Running WAY To Fast #11096
    atpat
    Participant

    +1

    I wouldn’t say it ruins it for me, but in the time taken to analyse a line to see how it to make it work better, running at maximum speed so the trains get around enough times to see what is happening, decades can pass and suddenly it’s time for another round of bloody vehicle replacement again. Other games, such as Civ, let you adjust this factor.

    Quarter the time taken, quarter the costs and revenues; but bear in mind that this may mean waiting four times as long for the time to pass towards that new vehicle type becoming available or having enough money to build new routes. My PC is fairly fast, but running at 4x definitely sweats the processor; and when there are a lot of objects to simulate, I think 4x is not really 4x faster – it just goes as fast as it can to try to approach that. Don’t underestimate how much is going on under the bonnet (hood) in TF. You may find that 4x is as fast as it can go unless you have your own supercomputer. Personally I wouldn’t mind this too much, but it has to be balanced. We want more time to study and perfect our lines, but we don’t want to have to wait for ages to accumulate enough capital to build the next stage of our network because the maximum running speed can’t exceed 4x.

    A word from the devs would be good here: is the 4x speed limited to 4x because that’s as much as a typical PC can manage? Is work being done to optimise the processing so it can run faster?

    in reply to: E 103 dissapears…. #11093
    atpat
    Participant

    Wait a few more years and you get a more suitable replacement loco.

    in reply to: stacking locomotives #11092
    atpat
    Participant

    Check out the guides to better understand the difference between traction and power.

    By the way, having two locos is called “double-heading”. Whilst I’m on the subject of railway terminology, they’re “signals” not “traffic lights”, and “points” (UK) or “switches” (US) forming “junctions”, not “intersections”…

    in reply to: Best way for bus/tram routes? #11091
    atpat
    Participant

    P.s. Deleting roads between towns, or industries for that matter, is definitely cheating.

    in reply to: Best way for bus/tram routes? #11090
    atpat
    Participant

    Lots of good advice, but I don’t think it’s true that “people travel from one zone to another. There is no specific destination.” Select a sim person: they each have a specific building in a specific town for work, home, shopping and leisure, and when they take a trip they emerge from one building and travel to another. What I haven’t tried yet is to follow an individual to see whether they persist in the sim after the end of a trip: do they later emerge from the same building they last arrived at and go to one of the others on their list?

    I have observed the lack of local traffic to industrial areas that many above have mentioned. I don’t understand it but I do note that residential buildings have an unemployment factor. Presumably the easier it is to get from home to a workplace, even in another town, the fewer unemployed there will be. Whether this becomes enough to make a line sustainable is another matter – I certainly struggle but I think my frequencies are too low and my stops too close together.

    in reply to: Warning when electrifying your lines #10453
    atpat
    Participant

    Perhaps obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: the reason this happens is because, unlike the road building, the railway switches can’t be placed absolutely at the edge of the adjacent object (station or another switch). There always has to be a gap, of up to three ‘clicks’ minimum I’ve found. Hence you get these tiny slivers of track at such places, which are then a pain in the backside come electrification; or reconstruction, for that matter: I spent some time trying to figure out why there was a collision on the alignment I’d just demolished track from, only eventually to spot the single sleeper that escaped demolition, lurking in the shadows under a bridge.

    Cashflow being critical, it doesn’t take very long for backed-up trains to destroy the finances irrevocably.

    Lesson learned…

    in reply to: Giving Thanks/Questions/Ideas #1454
    atpat
    Participant

    2 things:

    1. I’d like to add my support to your undertaking.  I too am excited at the potential of what you are doing.

    2. Signalling.  The purpose of signals is mostly to promote safety by enforcing sufficient gaps between trains (“headway”), speeds and caution to prevent collisions, but also to assist the integrity of the timetable.  Traditionally, signals not only protect junctions but also subdivide a route into sections.  Since you are having lineside rather than dynamic (“moving-block”) signalling, a block section approach is implicit.  On the other hand, all this could get very complicated and I wouldn’t expect you to go for ultra-realism.  What, then, will happen if a train catches another up?  Will it stop intelligently (i.e. its braking characteristics are always assumed to be adequate to do this by line-of-sight) or will there be block sections between signals?  i.e. if we put signals only at junctions, the entire route from one junction to the next will be considered a block section and no train will be admitted into it until the previous one has left it at the other end.  This would be beautifully realistic!

    in reply to: What about new videos/pictures #1449
    atpat
    Participant
    in reply to: Warehousing #1448
    atpat
    Participant

    Good heavens, you have your own private OS museum going there…

    in reply to: Can we modify the train/bus stations? #1446
    atpat
    Participant

    “It will be possible to add platforms (parallel to the existing ones) to a station, but only within limits that depend on the station type”

    So we will have to demolish the small station and build a new, large station.  Presumably this means that the (gone) small station will be expunged from all lines in which it was used, and a new large station will have to be added manually to them all.  Right?

    Moral: build a small large station from the start, and expand it!

    in reply to: Catenary system #1445
    atpat
    Participant

    Old thread, I know, but I thought I’d add that Leeds in the UK is hoping to implement trolleybuses (since the government refused to give them money for a new tram system, all UK cities, including Leeds, with one exception, Blackpool, having ripped out all their tram and trolleybus systems by the 1960s).

Viewing 13 posts - 1 through 13 (of 13 total)