Question for everybody

[dtrainBNSF1]

Hi all!

I'm finally making some headway with the K4s mod and I will probably begin testing on the power aspect sometime next week.

I'm on Spring Break now, and yesterday afternoon I decided to whip up a mod for Reppo's PRR Centipede as an exercise. It didn't take all that long as the loco has no dynamic brakes, easily the longest part of a diesel locomotive mod (in my opinion anyway). The loco is set up for its early days of passenger service at 3000hp (2237.1 kW in the sim file), 2506.24hp (1868.903 kW) at rail, 102.5kblf starting tractive effort, 52.8kblf continous tractive effort @17.8mph (the only figure I could find for its continuous tractive effort), and a new power curve based on those figures, in testing on Horseshoe Curve with a passenger train I've encountered an issue with a feature I forgot about because of the rarity at which I encountered when driving this engine pre-modification: the engine overheats.

For those not familiar with the Centipede in Train Simulator Reppo included a feature with the loco where it is possible to overheat the loco. If the engine gets over 120C you get an alarm, and if the temperature gets over 130C the whole locomotive shuts down and you have to wait for the engine to cool down before going through the start up procedure. I never encountered this particular feature in normal operation. Now that the loco has been modified, however, I can't even get past the signalbox at Slope with a 14-coach train (baggage, 11 P70 coaches and 2 diners) in a QD scenario before I get warnings about the engine overheating.

I could be putting too much weight on the engine, I could be driving a bit too aggressively, but this engine is now a bit of a bear to drive now. In a sense, however, it does address a particular fault the Centipede had in service on the PRR: it overheated ALL the time. Mechanically they were a nightmare, and only the overheating could be replicated in TS. According to those who worked on them, the traction motors constantly burned up because of the position of the blowers, oil leakage was a constant issue, the drawbar sometimes failed in operation so the front unit would separate from the rear unit, the loco could catch fire because of the oil leakage, and sometimes they both split apart AND caught fire. Now, you can't really replicate the traction motors burning up, the oil leakage, the engine bursting into flames, or the drawbar failing and the units splitting apart in TS so you don't get a full sense of how much of a headache these engines were in real life, but you can get a glimpse of some of the difficulties from the engine overheating.

I'd like to ask everyone's opinion: once I'm done with the K4s, does anyone want to try out this modified Centipede and give their opinion on whether or not a mod should be released for the Centipede?

[plethaus]

I'll give it a shot!

[dtrainBNSF1]

I made some changes to the tractiveeffortvsthrottle file and I managed to get to the Horseshoe Curve before overheating. It seems that the behavior of the overheating feature is linked to the amount of te being used by the throttle at a given speed - too much at a slow speed and the heat gauge increases too quickly, and te increases the slower you go, which even with a combined 6000hp still happens with 14 coaches. Given that there are 8 notches (as modeled in-game), I wonder what would happen if I scaled the tractiveeffortvsthrottle file to something similar to the one used in my Dash 9 mod?