Railworks America

Has anyone been able to get rolling stock to roll freely in a hump/classification yard with grade of say 1% ?

Nope I have tried as steep as 10% before and it will roll for a little ways and stop. I would love to be able to build manifest trains with a hump yard but have never been able to get it to work. I take the lack of replies as no one is interested in this problem?

I wonder if its as easy as modifying the braking properties down to almost nothing on a test subject boxcar and see what happens.

Trevor

I have a working hump yard, it is a test though, and unrealistically steep with short tracks and the bottom, but the cars roll to the tracks end.

The hump in Selkirk goes from 5% (hump) down to 1% (bowl), but I haven't yet tested whether it works (I assumed it didn't, but included the tracks as per the prototype anyway).

I've wondered about this.... the rolling stock has a Friction value... is that what makes them stop? Does the track have an "adhesion" factor or something like that? Would a special track help?

Rolling resistance is what it says it is ( it's somewhere just under the coupler section of the blueprint ); the big problem is keeping the brakes off. Change a few cars brakes to air-piped and see what happens then.

Or I guess you could change all the friction/resistance levels to near 0 and just let them slide... :)

Poking around I found this link to an old conversation that went no where. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1972 The model looks pretty good and has my attention since I have been wanting something like this incorporated in some of the routes. The closest Hump to me is in Cumberland MD and its not very big compaired to Selkirk or the UP's Bailey which is 3 stories high! Going just by photos and videos of operations I have tried several different car types with mixed results 5% isn't unheard of in reality,but in the sim it doesn't work very well anything steeper looks weird. Some cars do appear to roll better but, i'm afraid that technically I am worthless to this cause but it does sound interesting to hear the tech talk inner workings of the game. Thanks to those of knowledge who have chimed in.

You can't kick cars like in a flat yard either.

Problem with doing all this in a program is, how does it know when you want brakes because you're trying to leave some stock where it is, vs not wanting brakes because you're shunting.

When you see in F4 the coupling screen, you can see brakes for each car, but till now this stuff didn't work for me. If you are in a grade going up, then stop and drop off some wagons leaving them unbraked, they should roll back down the grade, but it never happened, the game takes them as braked when they are not coupled to the player train. In the other trainsim is different....

I'm having a problem with a scenario in which am in a 0.5% grade, moving backwards (down hill) to couple 4 cars parked, and drop off the last two cars. When I couple, the last car goes down the hill (as should be), then goes up hill (?!), down hill, mini up hill sometimes (again?!), and finally down hill till stop, it lasts 15-20 secs, like if couplers were rubber (elastic) maden, the cars are behaving like a guy in a buggy jumping! LOL Meanwhile the cars are having fun going up and down the grade, they recouple by themselves if you move forward (up) in the grade grade (sorry I dont' know how to explain this in English).

You can apply hand brakes in the scenarios, but I don't know what it does since the car don't roll freely in any case. I am presently working on a classifcation yard in the Fort Worth, Tx area. Hope I can get it to work right.

sleepyto wrote:You can apply hand brakes in the scenarios, but I don't know what it does since the car don't roll freely in any case. I am presently working on a classifcation yard in the Fort Worth, Tx area. Hope I can get it to work right.

Yep, am already applying hand brake, but the problem is that cars move up and down for 10-15 secs, in meanwhile I can't depart without automatic recoupling. What I got to run around this is: apply train brake after coupled in order to brake all cars, set hand loco brake to 100%, release train brake to 0% (to get no slack in couplers), throttle to notch 2 (25%), and only then release hand brake. It's working since then! Don't know if in real life is like that, but in TS2012 is....

Machinist wrote:When you see in F4 the coupling screen, you can see brakes for each car

Well yes, that's the handbrake. The game assumes if you've disconnected a car which has automatic brakes, that they're going to be left on ( which conveniently lets it become an item of scenery after a while ). If you change the brake type from ( probably ) AirSinglePipe to AirPiped then you won't have any automatic brakes, but you'll keep the handbrake... so hopefully it will just keep rolling. It may be that the game just stops loose items of stock after a time period anyway, it'd be good if someone investigated.

What would be really great is an uncoupling option dialog box. The original programing for Railsimulator/RW,that air is fully released,therefore brakes applied makes sense. But they didnt think far enough ahead that there are MANY circumstances in real railroading where the air needs to be "bottled",so that cars can roll freely. Kicking,dropping cars,etc,etc. This would be the greatest improvement I can think of to actual operations in RW. (I can think of plenty in editor) Simulated prototype actions are limited,and I would love to see this idea petitioned to the company. What I can picture is when you click on the uncouple icon between rail vehicles,you get a set brakes/bottle air option,and it can we selected with the same mouse movement.