Back in the "Sim Saddle" again!

Woohoo!! After about 3 to 4 years with no computer I finally have a new one that is up to date. Those of you that were here 3 years ago will remember me as a dev team member with previous RW railroad experience. My mane focus was on RW prototypical physics in OR format. I ran Open Rails for the first time last week and I am very impressed with the sim especially those framerates! I will be visiting the forums regularly and if there is any information or specific testing needed, don't hesitiate to ask. For now I do have a couple questions for the physics programmers. In multi-unit lashups do we have the 5 second per unit delay when applying and releasing the independant brakes. For eg: In the RW a five unit lashup upon applying th independant brakes or "jam" in rail-lingo the lead unit will start to apply it's brakes immediatlely but the rear unit will not start to apply it brakes for 20 seconds, and likewise for releasing the brakes. Where this really comes into play is when you have a wheelslip occurance on wet to greasy rail. As a rule it the lead unit is the one that slips and the way to overcome this slippage is to rapidly apply and release the jam so as to put enough drag on the lead unit's wheels to bring back down to the speed of the train. If you do this too slow you can cause enough drag on enough units to start bunching up the head end and upon releasing the jam you will get a knuckle in RW. It is very important to incude this delay in the sim. Since the brake cylinders do not move yet in the sim, it is very hard to see if this has been implemented. Some other tricks and physics related stuff that works in real life is wheel diameter growth when heated, drying of moisture on the railhead when contacted by a hot wheel and crushed sand remaining on the railhead when applied by a single unit or switcher. Let me explain a little here. As you know when you heat metal it expands. Well when I ran switcher jobs, I made it a point to get the units wheels as hot as possible and asap. The reason being that contact patch that each wheel has on the rail goes from the size of a dime to the size of a nickle. Don' sound like much but multiply that difference by 8 wheels and you now can pull 15 - 20% more weight. Also when you get the wheels that hot, you hear the water on the top of the rail sizzle and evaporate and voila you now can pull a cut of cars in the rain that you can in dry conditions. Now on the "laying down a bed of sand" thing- doing this when coming into a cut of cars on gives you sanded traction on all axles instead of the one next to the sander nozzle when pulling that cut. Also, if you stall on a steep grade the adopted procedure is to back the train about 10 carlengths with a full set to bunch to train and to lay down a bed of sand to dry or give all the locomotives grip and usually you should be able to get that train up the hill. It will be slow and you may have to do it occasionally on a rail greaser location on you way up but it does work. I've been out the loop for a ffew years so if this has been thought of or implemented in the sim, just disregard. BTW, it's good to be back!

Elvas Tower: Back in the "Sim Saddle" again! - Elvas Tower

Back in the "Sim Saddle" again! Rate Topic:

#1 Inactive_Turbo Bill_*

#2 captain_bazza

#3 thegrindre

#4 rdamurphy

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