Are long consists impossible?

[LoneWolfDon]

Going too fast or over an opposing junction perhaps?
About how many train-cars does the train consist of in total?

[arizonachris]

I have put together a 120 car double stack consist before, three engines in the lead, three in the middle, on Barstow/ San Berdoo, and I had no problems.

Lots of weird stuff with RW3 unfortunately. I've derailed due to "excessive tilt" where that never happened before.

[MikeK]

Any time I have a realistic length train and use over 20-30% dynamic brakes with no train brakes it derails. Hell, even with a 20 car train I can go up to 50% with some locos on straight and level track and get a derailment. I am pretty sure that if this level of DB derailed a train, there would be derailments every day!

The physics modelling in this game kind of sucks, unfortunately. I don't think there is anything that we can do about it.

I am really interested to see what consists are in the activities that will come with the Donner route. I live in Reno and regularly see 125 car trains going through town. I assume SP ran similar length trains when they owned the track.

If we get a lot of activities with trains that length, I am guessing there will be a lot more complaints coming in the future.

[thecanadianrail]

i use DB on a train properly, but you gotta know how to use it...can't have any slack in the middle of the train! (cars between locos if there is DP in middle) or else when that resistance comes crashing into those cars, plop off they go! use your airbrakes to take up the slack, then use db and release the air.

[MikeK]

Interesting, I'll have to give that a go, thanks!

[Trainguy76]

No, I don't even move, I molded a very long train with about 8 engines, and as soon as I got in the cab it derailed O.o

Check that the cars are not overlapping at all.

[Griphos]

Yeah, that's probably a consist problem when you put it together. If there's overlap, it'll derail right off.

Great tip on the DB! Going to make that my standard procedure now (air brakes, then DB, bailing off air).

[MikeK]

I played around more today with techniques for using DB on long trains without derailing. I still got derailments even at mid DB levels.

However, I noticed something interesting ... the derailment always coincide with the pause that happens when the game loads a new batch of scenery. I think that somehow the calculations in the background are also being paused, which implies that the next calculation uses a largish time period, which causes a spike in the calculated forces, which causes the derailment. In fact if I watch the speed closely even during normal running, I can see that it spikes up or down slightly whenever the game pauses to load new scenery.

On my machine this pause is very noticeable, at least half a second each time. It even causes the sound to cut out sometimes. I always wondered why I sometimes see issues that other people don't see.

If I am correct, then I have no idea how to get around this issue. Fork out the money for an SSD to reduce the size of the pauses perhaps?

Another case for proper multicore cpu support.

[SMMDigital]

Before your fork over the money, be aware that an SSD will reduce the tile-boundry delay, but it will not eliminate it entirely. With an SSD, Windows will load in about fifteen seconds, and shut down in five. Photoshop loads so quickly you cant read the splash screen. The Railworks.exe starts up extremely quick and boots to the choice menu very quickly. RailworksProc2 however, seems to be made out of turtles and snail mucus, and is resistant to anything "fast" that you might throw at it.

[arizonachris]

Jerry's right. Don't spend a lot of food money on an SSD. I set up a RAID 0 a while back and minimized that "stutter" when RW loads the next tiles, but didn't get rid of it. Don't think anyone has.

Now, B7, if you are getting a derail as soon as you go to start the consist you just put together, it has to be cars overlapping. I can't think of anything else it could be.

Griphos, you can't bail off the air in RW. And use DB very carefully, I have jackknifed a consist more than once with only 10% DB and not enough train brakes.

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

Have you tried some of the scenarios on the C&O Alleghany Sub?
Check out this great route at http://www.coarw.com and look for the extra scenarios. You will need some donationware assets but these are well worth the small fee which goes to maintaining RWA amongst others.
All the available scenarios are modelled to prototype C&O/Chessie System/CSC operations of the late 60's till now.

There are several with 100 car trains consisting of 100 ton aluminium bathtub gondolas, so I think gross weight is something around 13000 tons including 3 or 4 3rd gen AC locos like ES44AC.
The same train needs 4 to 5 2nd gen DC locos like SD40-2 to get over the eastern continental divide at Alleghany, Va.
There are other scenarios with 140 car trains consisting of 75 ton hoppers, also with a gross weight of 13000-14000 tons which needs no less than 8 1st gen GP9's.
Imagine during the steam era those trains were handled by just one 530 ton 7500 hp Lima "superpower" H8 2-6-6-6 engine up front and a H8 pusher for the 10 mile 0.6% ruling grade between Ronceverte and Alleghany.
Both the hoppers and gondolas are "enhanced" with special scripts to allow simultaneous control of the pusher engines and the car's weights have been increased to fully loaded.
These trains feel and handle real heavy on both throttle and brakes, which you are required to handle with care and understanding. Running these trains clearly shows the deficiencies of the TS12 physics engine, as the couplers get pulled way from their sockets at the head end and pushed into their sockets at the rear end. When shoved really hard, the cars even snuggle up to each other and get skewed, but I have not yet derailed a train on purpose. Even in emergency it takes quite some distance to come to a stop as most of the run is uphill.

The route is not yet finished to be able to run the trains downhill into Clifton Forge, though the tracks are all laid just to about Covington. So you can practise controlling such a heavy train with dynamic brakes.

Currently there are still some issues with some of the RW2 scenarios under TS12 but these will be sorted in due course. Check the COARW forum, there are lots of posting by me and a few others concerning this great route and the quality scenarios. I did manage to get a few troublesome scenarios running on just one install of TS12 but unfortunately am not able to replicate why I was lucky.

[Griphos]

Thanks Chris. Actually, I have a related question. I was just running one of Doug's excellent scenarios for HSC (Taming the Black Stallions). I was running the easier of the two coal drags, and was backing up for the two helpers when I got a derailment due to consist tilt. What happened was that I put the throttle to idle after getting up to about 5 mph backing up. But I was slowing down too much, so gave it a notch of throttle again. That took all the slack out and was pushing me back up toward 5mph and the derailment occurred. It was after all the slack was out, though, and I was pushing again.

What am I doing wrong there?

[Griphos]

You just look at the train after you've put it together. Sometimes when you place the cars, they don't couple, they overlap. I don't know why.

Any thoughts on my derailment problem on the HSC?

[arizonachris]

Any thoughts on my derailment problem on the HSC?

I don't have any of Doug's HSC scenarios yet so I dunno about that one. Could be anything from the 'dodgy physics" issue to the hit box issue and an invisible train on the other track.

[MikeK]

I've been experimenting with long consists today, and it isn't going well.

This shot is one of the many incidents I have experienced so far. The train has 5 Dash 9s, and 100 reefer cars, eastbound on the cajon pass route:

- I started at summit, and used minimum brakes as the front of the train got to the steep downgrade section a few miles east of the summit. I was doing maybe 25 mph by this time
- I added 5% dynamic brakes (the minimum possible) using the "." key as the speed got up to about 35 mph (the speed limit here is 50)
- I was able to hold about 35 mph with minimum train brake and 5% dynamic (wouldn't a real train this size need more on a 1.6% grade?)
- When I got to the end of the downgrade at the crossovers, the speed started dropping
- I released the brakes and enjoyed the awesome 3 second brake pipe recharge time.
- About 30 seconds later the speed started creeping up towards the speed limit I stabbed the "." key to increase the dynamic brakes. They went to 11%
- Within a couple of seconds the train derailed and flew a mile into the air. I quickly hit the 8 key so I could look around and grab the screenshot.

I have personally stood at the summit of Cajon and seen trains with more than 5 dash 9s on the head end and more than 100 cars with no distributed power come up the north track. I am at least 90% sure that when they went around the next corner and disappeared from view they didn't fly miles into the air as soon as the engineer lightly grazed the DB handle.

This game is awful and ridiculous.

2011-11-20_00004.jpg