[steamer_ctn]

Following a request from one of my testing team members I have been looking at the filling process for water troughs.

Water troughs (or pans) were introduced to speed up timetables by reducing the number of stops that a locomotive needed to do to refill with water.

Some reference information can be found:

UK Article

US Article


From a physics perspective picking up water from a trough had two key impacts:
i) Water flow into the tender is dependent upon the speed of the train. Hence water volume scooped up will vary speed.
ii) Lowering the water scoop into will create drag on the tender, and train, thus reducing the speed.

A blueprint has been created to cover the addition of these features to Open Rails, as well as any other changes associated with water filling over a trough that may need to be included.

Interestingly the UK introduced a number of diesel Electric locomotive that could also fill up from the water troughs. I am not sure whether it is a good idea to mix water and electricity.

[Csantucci]

Water trough operation is available in OR, in a compatible way with MSTS. Are you intending to add further features to that?

[steamer_ctn]

Csantucci, on 15 November 2018 - 11:02 PM, said:

Water trough operation is available in OR, in a compatible way with MSTS. Are you intending to add further features to that?

As I understand the current implementation, it does not cater for either of the following two physics features:

i) place any "drag" on the locomotive when the water scoop is lowered. There is in fact a considerable amount of drag created by the water scoop, and in fact railway companies caution drivers to take care, as the locomotive can slow down, and the rest of the train can bunch up behind it.
ii) changes in water volume depending upon the locomotive speed. It appears that the current implementation has a fixed step size, regardless of the speed of the locomotive, and hence it doesn't allow for different speeds of operation.

Thus I am hoping to provide a better physics implementation then MSTS, provided I have understood the current code correctly.

[Csantucci]

OK, they are interesting improvements.

[roeter]

steamer_ctn, on 15 November 2018 - 08:22 PM, said:

Interestingly the UK introduced a number of diesel Electric locomotives that could also fill up from the water troughs. I am not sure whether it is a good idea to mix water and electricity.

Most of the early diesels had steam boilers for train heating as very few carriages were equiped with electric heating. On long runs, the water supply for the heating might run out.
Steam heating survived in the UK into the 1980's.

Regards,
Rob Roeterdink

[SP 0-6-0]

roeter, on 18 November 2018 - 12:57 PM, said:

Most of the early diesels had steam boilers for train heating as very few carriages were equiped with electric heating. On long runs, the water supply for the heating might run out.
Steam heating survived in the UK into the 1980's.

Regards,
Rob Roeterdink

Last run of steam heated stock on Via Rail Canada was 1992.

Robert

[darwins]

It would be good not just to edit the physics but also look at the graphics.

I have only ever seen water troughs in MSTS routes on straight default track and not in tunnels.

In UK many of the water troughs were located on curved track and we had some troughs inside tunnels too!

Ideally OR should support all of these and allow troughs to be added onto other track types to match for example UKFS track profile.
This probably means troughs become something that can add on to any level track section rather than being part of the track shape.

[steamer_ctn]

An initial implementation of dynamic water filling from water troughs and pans has been added to Rel. 14 of OR NewYear MG. The initial functionality is for steam locomotives only, and allows the locomotive to fill up at different rates, depending upon their speed and the design (size and height) of the water scoop.

Rel 15 (coming soon) will allow the addition of a water effect (uses current steam effects code) around the water scoop.

An activity to demonstrate the functionality is available below. This activity operates on the CTN Test Route (latest version). Simply install and follow the instructions in the activity.

The rolling stock required for the activity are the Hall locomotive (note the water scoop modeled under the tender) and the Mark1 cars found on this page.

The minimum ENG file configuration required to add the water trough filling is the definition of an engine controller called WaterScoop (see Hall ENG file as an example). OR by default then uses default values for the water scoop design, etc.

However if it is desired to customise the design the following three parameters are available -
ORTSWaterScoopFillElevation - height of water scoop pipe above the

ORTSWaterScoopDepth - how deep the water scoop is below the surface of the trough water surface.

ORTSWaterScoopWidth - The width of the water scoop.


To add a water effect add the special effect called WaterScoopFX to the WAG file (tender in this case).

This feature is still subject to some changes, such as extending it to diesel locomotives.

Thanks

EDIT - Activity refreshed in later post.

[darwins]

Another thought on this one Peter is dealing with double heading.

In real life for obvious reasons two locos could not both fill up from the same trough at the same time.

The most common solution was for the loco crews to agree to fill up from alternate troughs.

[steamer_ctn]

darwins, on 03 April 2019 - 01:14 AM, said:

The most common solution was for the loco crews to agree to fill up from alternate troughs.

Would you like to do a test to see if both locos attempt to pick up from the same trough.

It may be a challenge for the AI loco to be set up for water pickup.

Thanks for the comments.