Multi-Track Station and Signals

[MrCanadianRyan]

I looked at the community guide for making a multi-track station and the signal for it. No matter what happens, when 1 train pulls into the 4 tracks, the next train waits all the way back at the last side track. It doesn't follow it through the next signals to the entry point of the station. Its perplexing.

[Doc Savage]

Beautiful read chaney...

I've spent the day in free mode messing about with RORO and non point to point set ups. Got some really nice stuff that works great for 2 stations, but not for an entire railroad. My RORO ended up looking like a lot of RERE.

After much spaghetti and time, I think I'll just stick with situational awareness and hope the Devs make the settings easier to find and use at the very least.

Cheers..!

[tgree69]

Nicely done Chaney! This is the kind of response I hope for from these threads from this type of gamer.

[goemerick]

What are signals for again? :direction.

But it's possible to assign trains to tracks an lanes, without laying any singals at all. I have posted 5 lanes of track to steam.. moving freight and passangers withouit them stopping.

My argument with someone is signals make trains wait and the more you add the more trains pause.

[Rori]

Originally posted by Mansen:

1. Real trains don't just randomly switch platforms.

Real trains use schedule, and do not stay in station few days :) So this game far from reality.

In real world stations has much more platforms then 4. Also in real world only passenger trains has their set platform (and it is changed from time to time). Freight trains do not have their platform set.

Originally posted by Mansen:

2. Micro doesn't mean randomly assigning a platform - also doing this would be a heck of a lot less efficient, since you'd need massive siderails on both sides of each station, causing slowdowns every time a train entered that block, and making efficient track merging quite impractical.

Have you seen solutions overcoming this problems - how many tracks they use? And it is far from real world how stations are made.

So ability to assign train to more then one platform - and train choosing from that set 1st available - will help a lot ... I do not mind micro management - but this problem I do not think is from such category - this is just complication.

[Bram]

Has this been fixed in the meantime?

[Doc Savage]

No more than the dog I don't own...

That and the fact that it isn't broken.

It may be a bit tedious at times when you forget to set it up as you go, but it's not broke.

Cheers..!

[Trip]

It's definitely broken. Assigning a platform to a train does not solve anything. You have no control over the timing of arrivals so unless you have one platform per route you're going to hit trouble. That would mean a lot of platforms and be extremely inefficient. When you expand a station you have to change all platform assignations.

[Dray Prescot]

I think part of your problem is a lack of one way Signals and maybe double tracks.

IF a train waiting at a signal (which includes waiting on a Station"s Tracks) can see a train ahead of it that COULD come back onto the track segment(s) immediately ahead of it, then it will wait for the train to clear out of the way. Use double tracks with one way Signals, and the following train will advance all the way to the last one way signal before the switch that sends the train ahead of it back onto the other side of the double track.

[Bram]

Not going over explaning why this can never work. If you dont understand it you clearly havent build something big or never played a proper train game.

You cant build something efficient because its lacking this mechanic. But then again the game is only super overpriced so we shouldnt suspect them to fix it..

[logicaloctopus]

The complaints here about signals are totally legit. The fine programmers of TTD (Transport Tycoon Deluxe) a game I used to play back in the 90s, got the signals right. There is an OpenTTD today and the devs of this game (Railway Empire) really ought to take a look at it! Here is a wiki of how signals work: https://wiki.openttd.org/Signals. There are a number of different types in OpenTTD but the only ones you really need are the path signals (one-way and two-way) which is almost what we have here in Railway Empire, except that here a multitrack station fails miserably. Please devs, take a look at how those signals work and make these ones work like that.

[logicaloctopus]

In fact, I requested a refund on this game. The bottom line is that the signal issue was solved 20+ years ago by developer's of a different game. Building complex rail systems is where the fun potentially is in this game and TTD got it right! If I ever notice that they've fixed this I would gladly pay again.

[Bram]

It's not a problem in about every train game ever. Even Factorio, that isnt even about trains doesnt have this problem. Its super lousy, laizy horrible programming. I've refunded the also..

[Paraplegic Rabit]

@all the simply assign a station to each train noobs - this doesn't solve anything, especially when your city is level 5+, your industries alone require 10-11 points of raw resources not to mention the other natural demands of the city's citizens. Trains breaking down, requiring services or simply resupply can allow other trains farther back in the lineup to overtake and unload out of order. For an easy example, two rail station. Train 1 assigned to unloading Rail 1 and Train 2 to Rail 2. Sure this will work perfectly no matter what train breaks down/services. Add two more trains, 1 per rail and the sequence gets quickly out of order that you will always have two trains trying to dock at the same rail while the others are waiting behind it.Multiply the problem by the factor of 10 when you have a 4 Rail train station. Even establishing a loop doesn't work, meaning: to get your train to bypass the first docking station and loop back to unload at the second <by selecting the correct secondary priority track>. Your train will always unload at the first it comes across, even if you tell it to unload at the secondary rail.

The train views and Port Royale esque supply/demand are done very well but the mechanics of the train AI break the game unfortunately. Would have spent hours on this game but getting bottle-necked due to bad programming is disappointing, hopefully they will fix it.

[gardlt]

The notion of my usage if I use multiple platforms on one line is that there must be room on approach to the station for at least 2, preferably 3 trains to stack: wait on the inbound line without blocking access to the other station.

I don't do this very often. I only look to do this when I have a busy incoming line that is consistenly overwhelming current capacity: more than 3 trains waiting.

I play on Trainiac at 50% speed. I also want to make a large company in a game that doesn't last more than half a day or so. There is some management strategy in the current system, but it is "outside the box". Bit like making inactive passing tracks between the active station platforms was in Railroads! Or passing without conflict at diagonal corners in RRT2.

[Chloe.T.]

I really want to like this game having been a huge fan of Railroad Tycoon 2 for the past 20 years. The problem is every time I think about loading this game up I pause and remember the scenario I always find myself in, trains queued up one after the other all waiting for access to the station. The stations need a revamp as it is the biggest thing preventing massive rail networks. Please, before you mention the countless band aid fixes above, I don't want to micromanage individual trains and platforms, it is not fun just anally retentive. It can't be hard to implement surely, as a train approaches a station it choses the platform that is free and it can get to easiest, ie least amount of line switching. I commute on the train several times a week and even the pokiest of stations can manage dynamic allocation of platforms, I don't understand the reason for denying the game this ability. For now I keep sadly thinking of loading the game then remembering the situation it always ends up in, gridlock :(