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"Ohio & West Virginia Railroading: Signals"

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rgarber (1426 posts)
Mar-17-02, 10:12 AM (EST) "Ohio & West Virginia Railroading: Signals" First of all, thanks very much for all the kind words said about the new route.======================================================== Let me take a minute to explain to those who didn't read the install carefully. There is three options found in your START menu (look for OH & WV Railroading menu item). Two of these options is you can swap the classic and modern cars back n' forth. You can do this an infinite amount of times.ALSO.. the third option; you can change the track texture easily through the START menu (look for OH & WV Railroading menu item). This is Jim Ward's Track Changing texture DOS program. It's real simple to use, just click on the track texture of choice and hit ENTER. You can run this an infinite amount of times too.========================================================Now.... down to business. Take your seats please.If you plan to write your own activities for the Oh & WV, you will find that little testing is necessary if you follow my suggestions (and if things are working as well as I have seen). For those of you who do not know how to write activities. I have two tutorials available. One is for sale by Abacus. The other which is just as good in my opinion though less comprehensive, is my freeware version found in the uploads section here. Note that the Oh & WV uses two different styles of double-track situations. In this diagram ABOVE, this represents DOUBLE-TRACK MAINLINE. Traffic runs like a USA street. North bound traffic runs on the right track (which would be the bottom track in this picture). Southbound track runs on the left track. What this means is you DO NOT USE begin passing paths for your AI train. The signals will protect each path properly. Because you are running double track mainline, you DO NOT put the player or AI train on the wrong track for any reason. The exception to the rule in this diagram would be for a train to get to the spur. In this picture, this is your classic passing siding situation. All the switches are protected properly. This is so trains can pass in either direction using either track. In this instance you have the option of treating this as double-track mainline OR single track mainline with a passing siding. Kinda a two-fer if you will. NOOOOWWWW... for you Route Designers... listen up. Preliminary studies (read activities) so far have been good. The whole timing issue with designing activities seems to be a non-factor, so far. What I did was to follow the example of Marias Pass here. Note that there are two interlocking objects. One is a two-head which when you observe Marias Pass, is only used in a block situation, as shown above. This is the only time I noticed these signals being used and so that's what I did too. In all other situations, the single interlocking head (which can have up to three signal heads) is used. And that's what I did too. I haven't tried running any open ended activities so I can't comment on that yet.This is just in the exploratory phase. Between the East Metro and this route I have observed two things to not do as a designer.1) Use the interlocking two-head interlocking object where a block is concerned.2) Never run the mainline through a turn-out of a switch. It seems to reset the AI logic (3 signal rule). I noticed there were two places on the Metro that drove me crazy. One is at Smallville and the other is at Big City. In both instances the mainline runs through the turnout of the switch. So I avoided doing that in this route.Okay, rally point is at 0600 hours... let's remember, get out bombs on target and we can all go home.Rich Garber Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

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