Understanding the Programming

On the previous TrainzMap close-up there are four portals to the left of Union Station. They feed trains into the station and receive trains from the station. The two outgoing westbound portals only delete outgoing trains, and it is the two incoming eastbound portals that need to be programmed. I have used the portals so that they “hang loose” just beyond a cityscape flat where I created a fake tunnel entrance to hide them.


The fake tunnel.

To program the portals you need to go to the end of the board and have the view from directly above so that you can click on the portal using the question mark for programming. My article in the VR Reading Room “Operations on the Rockbottom & Beatte Railroad” 15 June 07 details how to program portals.


The portals hanging in space.

The two incoming portals have been named “Eastbound Local Portal” and “Eastbound Express Portal” and the two outgoing portals have been named “Westbound Local Portal” and “Westbound Express Portal.”

For the session that is included, I programmed four trains, two local trains to run north and south and two express trains to run north and south. For good action, I programmed the local trains to be generated every 3 minutes and the express trains to be generated every 5 minutes. The traffic will build as the trains are generated and start returning as other trains are leaving. At the junction the trains will run north and south on the mainline, circle around the loop and then return to the station. On the mainline, tracks 1 and 2 are southbound; tracks 3 and 4 are northbound. There are 3 interlocking towers on the mainline, towers A, B and C and they have track marks assigned to them for the routing of the trains. Tower A is shown below; towers B and C are marked similarly.


Interlocking Tower A.

Union Station has four tracks numbered 1,2,3,4. Track 1 is the local track heading towards the westbound local portal. Track 2 is the express track heading towards the westbound express portal. Track 3 is the eastbound express track from the eastbound express portal. Track 4 is the eastbound local track from the eastbound local portal.


Union Station Tracks 4,3,2,1 (in surveyor).

Because you need to have at least one train on the tracks to start any operating session, I placed a local GP Santa Fe local passenger train on track 4. That train is programmed using the edit session/driver option accessible from the menu in Surveyor. It leaves the station 30 seconds after the start of the session, heading to the junction then heading south on the mainline and finally circles around to the station then to the portal. The next train will be in three minutes from the eastbound local portal and in five minutes from the eastbound express portal.

After a fairly short period things will get very busy as trains keep coming from the portals and start arriving back at the station. I program all trains to stop at Gotham Tower’s control points for 30 seconds, incoming or outgoing, before they proceed. Since some of the tracks cross over each other, as the tower operator/dispatcher you will be able to place a momentary hold on any train to keep collisions from happening. If a train does collide with another at the crossover point it will just pass through the other, but the passengers will get one heck of a scare! [Continue]

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Article and screen shots ©2007 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.

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