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I need some clarification on this, because I've never tried it before.During an activity, if one couples a player engine to a loose non-driveable engine, presumably you now have the additional traction power of the AI engine added to the player engine? Does it follow then, that if you have a loose consist of cars with an AI pusher at the back, and you couple the player engines to the front of this consist, will you then also benefit from the added traction of the pusher? Or is this just cosmetic?Can someone give me the details?Thanks,
Playing with some of this stuff over this past weekend, yes it does make a difference. Something I have seen in the yard here in Phoenix is a pair, 1 Gp35 and 1 gp39-2, pulling about 30 loaded cars from one yard to another, there is a very slight downgrade between the 2 yards. Try this in the Sim and it probably won't even move.
Well, I just put together a test activity using both situations I described. Both appear to work well enough. Its interesting how the helper engine, in both cases, suddenly comes to life the moment it is coupled, and begins to belch smoke. But what I want to be reassured of is that the additional traction power is being added. I have no doubt that when engine strings are already coupled at the start of an activity, their power is cumulative, but does the simulation effectively perform that in all cases when the coupling occurs later, mid-activity? Particularly in the case of a pusher engine that is widely separated from the player engine by cars? The question might seem silly, given all that has been dicussed about helpers, but after numerous searches here, I found a lot of information that danced around the subject, but never really confirmed what I'm asking. Perhaps I just failed to use the correct keywords. It seems so basic; I just know someone knows. I should know, but my activity design has been so narrowly focused that I have not done any work with this stuff yet.
Give ya good example:Using PON6, since it has open ended activities:Start with the Anderson Heavy, take your pair of gp38's and go up to Paludan, pull ALL of the cars from there into Anderson.Go to Fowlis and collect the cars and engine from there, pull this batch over to Stevens Point, sort cars as you see fit and drop the engine at the enginehouse,go up to Xacto and again collect all of the cars, Armstrong, Davis ridge, and Hunttown,and enocell by the time you are ready to head back to stevens point you will have about 30 cars and 3 engines headed back to stevens point. Also go over to timberlake and collect up the loaded log cars.The hard part is finding enough room to get all of this in a sigle consist headed for anderson. I have done it onceso far, but this Sim does have its quirks.All makes for a day long excursion..
I'm convinced. Just ran a switch engine helper at the end of my coal train to get it up a grade. The extra 1000hp was apparent. Normally this situation would nearly stall the train. What I'm working on is to emulate traction motor failure under certain conditions using old engines. Seems to be working well, but requires a lot of tweaking.thanks all,
Hee-hee, that would make for a long excursion. Nice thing about open ended activities is that you're done when you want to be done!Easier way to check it out is to use the Johnsburg Heavy activity, assemble all the cars in Johnsburg yard, then back them toward Johnsburg station past the Johnsburg wye. Turn left into the wye and head up the South Pass, see if you can make it to the top without stopping. When (not IF, but WHEN) it stalls, reverse back downhill to the helper shed, and couple onto one of the helpers, at the back of the train, in the middle, or wherever. (CAREFUL, it's a slight downgrade from the Fiddletown cutoff to the helper shed, don't let the speed build up!) Then try again, and you'll see it definitely adds more power.Steam is possibly a different story, even when two or three steamers are coupled together at the head of the train, from an exterior view you can watch the drivers start slipping, apply sand, and only the player engine digs in and pulls, any helpers will continue to slip their drivers. Apparently the helpers don't have any sand. It's possible the diesels do that too, but I've never been able to tell if the wheels are spinning or not, probably because they're so small. With the bigger drivers on a steam engine it's glaringly obvious when they're spinning.