Buff and Draft problems

[Srimera]

please forgive me if ive got the terms wrong. After watching a program about a coal train on discovery channel i became interested in these opposing forces, i understand the concept completely, my question is, does RW portray this realistically ? i set up a train with the same amount of wagons as a train i randomly found in Google Earth, and after a quick measurement i found it to be over 1.5 miles long, i may be out by a few meters, but still, this is collosal compaired to the longest trains we have over in Britain, anyway, i proceded to test this train on a quick test track i set up, basically flat and about 5 miles long, it took a while to get moving but once it did i was able to pick up speed quite quickly, this seamed wrong for a start, and on coming to a complete stop and releasing the brakes i shot forward up to a speed of 31MPH, even tho i only reached 15 during the test, does this happen in real life? and if so how do you control it?

[Kali]

Getting up to speed is not necessarily wrong; at low speed you won't get any noticeable aerodynamic effects, and rolling resistance is roughly constant so the acceleration is mostly dependent on the characteristics of the engines, the way tractive effort drops off with speed. Also very dependent on gradient of course. Did you load the wagons?

On the other hand the last bit is very wrong and is something to do with the way RW manages coupling slack - I'm hoping ( and rather suspecting ) that it'll be fixed in 17 days. If you braked hard with the engines you could stop the front of the train while the back was still moving quite fast and get some surging, but certainly not that much.

[Srimera]

Thanks for the explination Kali, yeah i did load the wagons, i copied exactly from the Google Earth image, what suprised me is that it only had 3 SD70 type locos, 2 at the front and 1 at the back, this is what suprised me about the acceleration and it being so quick, in videos on youtube it shows upto 12 locos sometimes altho i guess thats more to do with terrain, i was looking throughout Nebraska area where its pretty flat so i guess this plays a big part too, again, thanks for the explination, atleast i know its not my bad driving

As for the Buff, i did hope that this was wrong, i cant see many american engineers likng their job if this was an issue, is it possible to play about with coupling bins and maybe do a few tweaks or is it more of a core RW2 problem ?