[charland]

Recently I uploaded the Conrail Kellog Branch route that included the Fonda Johnstown and Gloversville. Until the Delaware Otsego System bought the FJ&G the normal operation was for the CR Amsterdam yard crew to start their day by travelling on the mainline to Fonda, switch the cars left overnight for the FJ&G, wait for the FJ&G train from Gloversville to arrive, exchange cars, and head back north then sort the cars the left into eastbound and westbound cars before heading back to Amsterdam.

I still use MSTS Activity Editor to create all my activities, but have been test running them in OR for years. The Amsterdam switcher path has four reverse points. It get this to work took over 12 attempts. The Conrail mainline is signaled and is 23 miles long. Other then the first AI train of the day, the 13 other AI trains run from end to end. I normally saw the AI traffic in about the same places or roughly the same times. One Monday morning there were a lot more cars in Fonda then usual and I was 15 minutes later then normal starting to head back to Amsterdam. As I was leaving Fonda I lost the light and had to wait for an eastbound freight to pass, then had to wait until that train cleared the next two block before I was given a yellow and was allowed to proceed at restricted speed. Two blocks later I finally got a green and was able to speed up.

So, the moral to the story is that creating activity in MSTS AE still works when run in Open Rails, you just need everything to be set up right, and that's probably true for activities set up in TSRE as well. Activities that were made in MSTS were never meant to be run in Timetable or Dispatcher mode and that's where people may be having trouble with them.

Paul :-)

[Laci1959]

Quote

^I am not a big fan of location events that affect train operation because they are set in the TSRE, independent of the train's path. The location event can potentially affect any train passing over them.

The location event was also used by MSTS. From there he was transferred to the OR. This is not TSRE specific, only the task creator part of TSRE adopted it, because it is part of the game.
Almost everyone here uses TSRE or TT. Only one or two old bikers still stick to MSTS.
For some reason, we have developed the habit that each train gets its own dedicated route (path). Many times the path is physically the same, only its name and identifier are different. This way, the location event is not a problem.
I never liked it, but now I take advantage of it.

[railguy]

^Quite often, on long routes where I'm running an activity from end to end, I will use the same path for multiple opposing AI trains. After all, much of the time, that is how a real railroad operates. Passing paths, more specifically how OR evaluates them, makes such an activity design workable. On a couple of activities that I built recently, 11 AI trains only use 3 paths. The activity that I mentioned in my earlier posts ran just fine all the way through. I'm now reworking it again--adding more loose consists, and adjusting some AI times just to make the run more interesting. I don't know when I will run it again, as it takes 5 1/2 hours to run from end to end. Another advantage of this type of activity design is that one can "swap out" a player train and its path with an AI train and its path, using the original activity file to create the "template" for the modified activity, thus essentially running the activity from the perspective of another train. Sometimes, one can even do that within an existing activity by simply "trading places" from running the player train to running an AI train, using the Alt+F9 function. I'm working on another activity now--this one for the Shasta Route. For those who might ask why I don't release these activities on Elvas or Tsim, it is because I use rolling stock from my inventory of stock gathered over a 15 year period, plus a lot of personal renumbers, etc. Even after purging a lot of the old MSTS unattractive stock, my current inventory sits at 18,784 pieces of rolling stock and 5,774 consists, so trying to figure out what the original source of stock is in a given activity can be a real chore. Unlike activities where the activity creator may use the same consists over and over again in the activity, most of the activities that I create have a unique consist for each AI train. I find that running an activity where the player sees the same AI consist multiple times in the activity gets boring really fast.