Coupling and decoupling trains, Loop Until.

[The__Brit]

Im sure these have already come up.
A: Coupling and Decoupling trains at Stations and Yards. Would be nice to have a 2 Unit leave a major area, and be able to split it when it gets to a more rural location.

B: Timetables: Autorun could do with an 'Until' option in the timings. So we can say 'Loop' and give it an "until' time. Rather than having to create messy manual timings.

(i havent been playing long, so I may have just missed these somewhere?)

[adlet]

Yes both have been suggested before. There are technical requirements involved in both that don't make them easy to implement.

On B, trains are present in the game 24x7 somewhere, with one exception, on a service (non-passenger) line, at a station set as a black hole depot, they would disappear into it. So if autorun ends at a set time, where do the trains go? Presumably would not want to just make them stand idle wherever they were at that time until the work restarts the next morning. So effectively need to have them reassigned to another non-passenger line and then they perhaps to into a black hole, or just a normal depot, depending on this line settings. All in all, probably a bit too much for auto-run,

What you want though is very easy to achieve through a combination of one train on manual orders and several auto-copy trains. Set one train to get to the passenger line at 6am and run say until 11pm, send it to your desired depot at that time (two orders all in all). If the line has 90 minutes loop time and you want 5 minutes interval, you need 18 trains. Purchase and set the additional 17 trains to be autocopies of your first train, and NIMBY can automatically figure out the interval (which would be 5 minutes). And this will operate exactly like autorun with limited hours of operation, and you only have one train's schedule to manage.

On A - I think coupling/decoupling would require serious changes to certain functional elements in the game (e.g. allow running at red light sometimes, so a joining train can access a platform with another train it would join with, or handling timetables for trains that are not in existence - currently part of another train). I don't know if it will ever happen, The easiest for now you can do is to add a half-size train that would operate the branch and be time-coordinated with the main line train. (Or terminate the full train at the junction and have two half size trains go from there). It may not feel realistic enough and there are some ways to make it feel more realistic but that's what it is for now.

[Finno]

As a "trade-off"-idea for the coupling point:
I am currently planning to do it with two single train units coming in and disappearing in a black hole, then the double unit spawns.
The problem for me now is, that the trains from the other direction are coupling on another platform so I have to let the single units drive to the correct platform which is.... well .... not very nice.
For me a feature would be awesome to teleport the trains from one black hole to another. In my opinion this shouldn't be to hard to implement in the following fashion:
Having a depot line set on black hole with two or more platforms the train switches its position instantly when the time has come.
I hope this is something you could look into and it plays into your idea of the game.
Greetings from Germany

[adlet]

Sorry, I am not a developer, just a user. I can just offer advice on how to handle a particular issue.

With two platforms, you can have a dead-end track at the end to which both platforms have access, that would be a single black hole platform for these half-trains. You can use invisible track to make sure it's not a sore in the eyes, or alternatively cover the extension into the dead-end with a simple building type with some texture. Or drop the incoming track right after the end of where it stops at the platform to level -1 and pass it under the platform to immediately join the track on the opposite side and lead into a black hole - the train will not be visible when passing under the platform.