[B & O GUY]

Folks

I have this little thing going on with OR Ver. X2003. Last night I decided to take the little Shay out for a romp on the Eureka & Palisades route. I released the brakes and pushed the forwarder to about 30% forward. Then as I advanced the throttle I heard 1 chuff and the whole train disappeared. See photo 1 and 1_1 as to her sitting proudly on the rails. Then in photo 2 and 2_2 all that is left is a puff of smoke and the whole train is gone.







The first time it happened I thought it had exploded or was jet propelled and had left the area hastily. So tonight I had to line up behind the train to see if it had moved someplace else. But no. Poof and it was gone.

I don't know what is going on. Route, the locomotive or the attached train. Or maybe a combination of faults maybe. The Shay I've run previously in earlier versions of OR with no problems other than it's a bit fast for a Shay. The rolling stock and the route I've never used before. This is a new PC with more than ample capability and is a Windows 7 machine with 8 gig of ram and 2 gig of video memory. I don't think it's a machine fault. I've run other trains on this version without a hiccup.

I've included the OR log file. Any help you could give me would be appreciated.

 Open_Rails_Log.zip (2.26K)
Number of downloads: 208

Thanks
Allen

[Fleegle411]

I've had the same thing happen on another NG route, if I hit the spot where the thing disappears fast enough the game gives me a big long error message and closes. It happened to me in version X2007

[wellsburg]

Allen,

I posted the same findings a couple of weeks ago. No one else reported the "puff effect". On my machine, it also occurs with some of Bill Pratt's locos. Happens with all OR versions I've tried and even with external hard drives. With so few users finding a problem, maybe it is a video card problem. Mine is an AMD Radeon HD 6800.

Mike

[rdamurphy]

I'm having the same problem: Radeon HD7790. Windows 8.1 Radeon drivers are about as buggy as the Amazon...

Robert

[B & O GUY]

I have Nvidia 570 GTX SLI cards. They have worked great so far. Maybe I need to update to their latest drivers? The one loaded is a couple of months old.

Did the log file show anything? OR didn't crash. I spent a few minutes looking over the location of the one puff for my lost train and I had the feeling that I could have run the activity all night with no train. No error messages pop up. There's just a simulator without a train. :negative: I did try all of the views but couldn't get any movement like a phantom train moving along. All views were stuck at that location except to use the two or three key along with the eight key. Then movement in any direction was possible.

I'll try another train today in the same route but use one of the other narrow gauge pieces of equipment and report back what I find.

Is this version too outdated to do any serious testing? Should I just move on to the next release?

Thanks

Allen

[Csantucci]

I wonder if it is a bug related to this one http://www.elvastowe...s-disappearing/

[B & O GUY]

I see in one of those other threads as I jumped around to people with similar problems. Someone mentioned that their car or locomotive had only one bogie. This train of mine has a single 2 axle unit. The tender or water car on the back of the Shay is set up with 2 axles as a single bogie locomotive. It's a trailer with 2 powered axles. This was done to make the drive shaft work. And it had up until this point. :D



Allen

[B & O GUY]

It happened again. This time with Bill Pratt's C-16 D&RGW Consolidation double headed with the T-12 4-6-0. And they didn't even make one chuff or leave any smoke. Just gone!

I ran earlier with a couple of Jon Davis's E&P 4-4-0 and Sumter Valley #50 4-6-0 and they didn't cause any problems.

So I don't have any explanation as to why this should be happening with certain models and not others. Guess it will always be a mystery to me. The experts will have to figure it out.

Thanks
Allen

[Fleegle411]

Hey Allen, when these trains disappeared was vibration on perchance? I was running on the route I had this trouble with but I had forgotten I'd turned vibration off, when I flipped vibration on, poof, gone. I set vibration to 0 and the train re-appeared, though it wasn't about to move, but it responded to the spacebar to blow the whistle. cycling through vibration levels a second time yielded the same results.

[wellsburg]

Hi,

Some progress solving the "poof" problems.

Regarding the West Side Lumber Co, Shay 15, the trailing tender eng file ( Shay-15-2.eng ) has some zero entries in vital parameters. Changed the following from zeros to the displayed:

NumCylinders ( 3 )
CylinderStroke ( 12in )
CylinderVolume ( 11 in )

These match the parameters for the primary .eng file ( Shay-15.eng ). The modified Shay performs as expected in OR.
The zero entries were flagged as a Warning in the OR log file. Don't know how I overlooked this previously.

Regarding the "Poof" problem with Bill Pratt's K37s, the problem is in the crew car wagon file. Remove the crew car from the consist and the K37 performs as expected in OR. The OR log file flagged an errant - in the friction section of the K37CrewCar .wag file but removing this did not correct the poof problem.

I used an old Invisocar wagon file linked to the K37-CrewCar.s and the K37 with crew worked fine in OR.

Mike