1.12.11 Train spawning at station 26 hours early taking up a platofrm for over a day.

[djplong]

Ok, I have a large game that's had some issues with the 10k pax station limit and I've worked around it - all because of a chokepoint being a trans-atlantic route. But now, something else has come up with the route.

Because of the long distances involved, I had to set lines to "Custom periods" for their scheduling (the standard Weekly schedule had hours-long stops along the way to fix in the 168 hour week). So here's the situation:

Custom Period - 85:00:00
- Line is over 3,000 miles long (Eastern Canada to Chicago area)
- Only one stop between the Eastern Canada "landing point" of the trans-atlantic service and the series of Chicago-area stops - that stop is in Toronto.
- After the re-do of the schedules, I watch the new trains spawn and everything seemed ok.
- Then I saw a train complain of being stuck at a signal.
- Train was on approach, eastbound, to Toronto.
- Was stopped because a train was occupying the available platforms.
- Train at platform had a TWENTY SIX HOUR WAIT that was counting down.
- I looked at the "State" tab and that train was supposed to spawn in 26 hours IN GARY Indiana.
- I intervened that train - it went away and the train behind it pulled into the station for it's normal stop and continued.
- Shortly thereafter, another train popped into the station with a 26 hour countdown.
This train, as well, is listed as though it's between Gary IN and Toronto.

Line specifics:
- It's over 6,000km long with 152 trains, meaning 11 minute headways.
- There 7 stops in the Chicago area to distribute/collect passengers - then no stops between Gary and Toronto and no stops for the 2100km between Toronto and the Eastern Canada trans-atlantic transfer station.

I have no idea why this train would spawn, why it spawned there in a spot blocking traffic and starting a countdown of over 26 hours.

[adlet]

Trains only spawn at stations, so they cannot spawn between Gary and Toronto. I think normally they spawn when they are at the station, so unless the long stop is in the timetable, it should not happen. If you post a link to your model may be able to look into it for more considerations. Also, with stations this far away from each other, it's probably a good idea to have extra platforms in case something happens with a train. This could help with the issue of having an occupied platform when a train is spawning.

[djplong]

Yeah, that's the weird part. Why it's spawning in Toronto more than a day before it has to leave (and there are 151 other trains on the line, and there should be a train coming through Toronto - or spawning there - every 11 minutes) is the mystery to me. I already had a spare platform to handle late/early trains.

Silly question - where do people usually post their saves as I've never really done that for a Steam game before. (And there are custom trains being used that I haven't put in the workshop)

[adlet]

In the Save menu, there is a Share game button. You will see 5 slots available to save various models to share. You are sharing a fixed copy of your game file, i.e. it is disconnected from your own master file (and so anything anyone does to it won't affect your master file, and likewise anything you do after this won't reflect in there). You can overwrite this save with a later version or remove it from the shared cloud as well. Once saved, you can copy a link to it and paste here.

[djplong]

THANK YOU! Had no idea it would be THAT easy. Here's the link - and it SHOULD open up near Toronto with the particular like ("A 1 C") highlighted in the Lines panel

https://share.nimbyrails.com/SlT7uDrXPj5uG9lGM_VQtA

[adlet]

Thanks! Here is what is going on. The line circulation time is 28 hours 20 minutes (which fits 3 times into the custom period of 85 hours, see Default timings under Lines for this line A 1 C). The problem is the week has 168 hours, and this does not divide into either 85 hours or 28 hours 20 minutes.

Your first train FLYER-0034 starts its first trip on Monday at 6:00 Canada Chicago Departures time. Its next trip is Tuesday at 10:20, then Wd at 14:40, Th at 19:00, Fr at 23:20. This trip would normally end and a new trip would start on Sunday at 3:40. However, then the train has to be ready to go on yet a new trip on next Monday at 6:00, and there is not enough time for that (only 26 hours 20 minutes).

Because this additional trip is not possible, the train ends up spending this unusable extra time of 26:20 ("pad time") at the station which has "Custom duration wait in this stop" flag checked. Line A 1 C has many such stations, and in such case all extra time is spent at the last station with this flag, i.e. station 17 Toronto Union. (Note the setting Apply Extra stop time to Manually picked stops applies to the extra time not needed for the single trip on the line, not to the pad time between individual trips).

If you look at the timetable for train FLYER-0034, it actually has this massive stop in Toronto from Sa at 18:43:39 to Sun at 21:05:40 (line time, which is 2 hours ahead of NIMBY time). The same applies to all other trains, with a shift. It just happens that you have Saturday afternoon on your timeline, which is when these very long stops in Toronto happen. The current spawned train FLYER-0041 has this long stop from Sa 19:39:34 to Su 22:01:35 (line time). The next train FLYER-0042 spawns at 17:50:45 (NIMBY time), which corresponds to the start of its scheduled Toronto stop at 19:50:45 (line time), and will start its 26:20:00 wait, and this will then apply to all other trains on this line as well.

So to recap, this is a problem with line settings, unrelated to the spawn itself. Ideally you want to change the line run time such that a multiple of it equals 168 hours exactly. Your minimal loop time for this line is 28 hours 55 seconds - it's the 55 seconds that prevent this line from fitting nicely into 168 hours and creates this big effect. So I would try to find a way to accelerate the line to make a roundtrip exactly 28 hours (or less) - this would mean 6 round trips for each train in a week. If this is not possible, 5 round trips means 33 hours 36 minutes per trip - this means you need to spread the extra 5 hours 36 minutes across various stops. There are only 18 stops, so that's a lot of time to add if you want to add it to each stop - each station would need to hold 2-3 trains at the same time with the 11 minute interval.

One thing you could do is to add "layover" stops to the line where extra time would be spent (like a yard) - great idea by @AngryDragon. For example, add a small yard past Kenosha. A train after arriving into Kenosha would pull into this yard, spend say 2 hours 30 seconds in the yard, then back to Kenosha and back on the way. You would have about 14 trains in this yard at any time, so make sure it has 14 separate tracks there, and use alternative platform functionality to spread trains across these tracks. To prevent pax from boarding or alighting, you can set up these flags for that station (and no pax would stay on board since the train will go back to Kenosha after the yard stop). You can do the same on the opposite terminus too, and then you only have 36 more minutes to spread out, i.e. about 2 extra minutes per stop.

Hope this helps!

[djplong]

I was having a heck of a time trying to work rational wait times on the really long runs. On most of my other long lines, I don't have to worry about multi-hour layovers and simply put in a couple of platforms, if needed, to handle the excesses at the end of the line if the headways are shorter than the layovers.

But when you have over 150 trains on a line THAT long, there's no way to have that many layover tracks. The "Weekly" period meant VERY long stops - and I thought the "Custom" period solved that problem. What I didn't know, that you mentioned, is the "Hard" schedule star time of 6AM Sunday. Given that, at least now I better understand what's happening.

What I'd REALLY like, if it were possible (and it might be because I've never 'gotten' my mind around the purpose of depots), would be to get to the end of the line, throw the train in the depot and let it act like a multi-dimensional holding tank that dispatches trains when needed. I guess I'm going to have to go read up on depots because the comments I've read about them seem to indicate they COULD be a solution...

[adlet]

Yes a depot could definitely solve for this. The most simple incarnation of depot is to have one manual order to circle the train e.g. from 6 to 23, and one more manual order to send it to the depot at the end of the last circle. Then all other trains can be auto-copy of the first one.

The idea in my previous message last paragraph effectively embeds a depot into the autorun functionality by having a station where the train will be empty and no one will enter or leave.

[MirkoC407]

You can build a black hole style depot. Then you need only one track. Trains disappear into thin air on arrival and rematerialize on leaving.

[adlet]

Originally posted by MirkoC407:

You can build a black hole style depot. Then you need only one track. Trains disappear into thin air on arrival and rematerialize on leaving.

Not as part of an autorun operation though. The virtual depot in autorun has to be part of the pax operation and thus not black hole.