I'm working on an industrial switching activity for the Ohio River Railroad. I intend to put some of my cars on a siding to run around them and push them into an industry, but the dispatcher won't give me permission past the stop signal into the siding to pick the cars up after running around them. He keeps saying "permission denied", and the activity ends when the train passes the signal. Unfortunately, there are no non-signalled sidings on the part of the route where the activity is taking place. How can I fix this?
Hard to answer this question when I don't know where the siding is so I'm gonna generalize here.Parts of the route are going to be more friendly to switching than others. This is because of the automatic/manual switches. Switching activities tend to be unfriendly to AI trains. So because there are two types of switches, you have to see what switches are where when designing your activities. There's no easy way to do this. It would have been nice if Kuju had given us an indicator in the AE which is which. So you literally have to go into the RE and spot the switches. Automatic switches become a problem if there's no path for the player to follow.So part of your problem is trying to figure what I thought would happen in that area. For instance, those areas where I wanted more switching to take place, I created branchlines off the mainline. If you see a signal or a passing siding on the branchline then I intended AI trains to run through the branchline too. To make what you want to do easier, I placed manual switches inside the passing siding. If you see I didn't do this at the place you are working at then I didn't anticipate run-arounds there.Unfortunately I've been so busy with extending the route I still haven't gotten around to making activities yet to test the signals in various places. Remember too, on the mainline, the right track is northbound only, left is southbound only. Don't use the begin passing path on the mainlines. Shouldn't need to.Rich Garber