Repair Yard with Control Track

[Anonymous]

I had a rather complicated, 10 big step (and lots of little steps), process that I was having trouble controlling. Then I remembered someone’s post about using a control track separate from the one the trains are running on. It was even suggested that this track could be burried. That approach worked well for this problem. I left it exposed.

This small layout uses a control track to handle movement of 4 cars between 5 sidings. 2 sidings have Carriage Repair work shops. The control engine (blue) advances to set the switches appropriately and then starts the switcher engine (red) on it’s way. Each siding has controls to cause the decouplers to activate or not and cause the engine to return when it has either delivered or retrieved a carriage. When the switcher engine is near its return spot, the control engine is started to begin the next step.

This layout is the result of saving the bigger layout that contains it, and then erasing everything I didn’t need and shrinking the table to 2 x 1. I tried copy and paste to a new table, but all I got was the track. None of the controls came with the paste operation. Is there a trick I don’t know?

Anyway, the layout is here:

http://www.shotscan.com/RuleTheRail/RepairYard.zip

Roger

[Anonymous]

Hi Roger,

That’s a nice piece of work you’ve done. Will you be posting the larger layout that this is part of?

I’m afraid you’re right. You cannot paste controls from one layout to another.

Although not as polished as yours, the attached layout is a portion of the Colorado and Southern layout I may never finish . It represents a switching job in the Denver yard. Trigger the action by tripping the ‘start’ signal.

Regards, Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi Roger and chris,

good works,but why you dont use sketches to write down the steps,the locos have to do to switch the signals,Psu´s and switches. It´s usefull to remake the controls if you copy and paste the layoutpart

[Anonymous]

Hi Chris and Peter and BrainBomber,

Chris, I ran your Denver Yard. Wow. The sidings have sidings and it is not nearly as orderly as the planners would want. They must be avoiding lots of terrain. It also looks like it grew like topsy to meet new shipping requirements. When you model real things, you find lots of cases where compromises are made, just to get the job done without crippling the yard during constrution.

I noticed that you made extensive use of time delays on your controls. This makes for less “wasted” motion in the yard. You can get the loco and car just clear of the switch that needs changing and then make the change. It also looked like the control loco sometimes activated itself to get to the next step. Is that so? Your layout also has much more realistic scale speed for the loco.

I tried to have as few timing dependencies as possible in my layout.

Almost everything is event driven. When the Red engine finishes a task it triggers the Blue engine to proceed to the next step. The blue engine then sets switches and sends the Red engine off on the next task. There are only 6 controls that have delays. There’s one at the end of each siding to restart the red engine in reverse. The sixth one wasn’t actually needed but it “felt” better to have the blue engine run through the last control for a couple seconds before it scampered back to start the sequence over again.

I will post the complete layout soon. I’ve finished the Freight part of the operation and am now trying to get the passenger station to work without collisions. When that works, I’ll post it. I don’t think these things are ever “done”. But there are times when it’s at a point where you can give it a real name and save it in a special place. That’s when I’ll post it.

Peter, I did start with a list. I was trying to do all the work with controls on

the main tracks without a control track. It appeared impossible, even with just the list. So I did a new list with the control track feature. That one almost worked when I put it on the layout. As I fixed the layout, the list got out of date. Also, the red-side blue-side part of control wasn’t actually in my list. With better discipline, maybe I could keep my list and the layout better synchronized. 😳

Now here’s the request for Brainbombers:

It would be extremely helpful if there were an operation, maybe activated by the SAVE button, that would create a .txt or .csv file with all the controls listed. This would create

You’d need to show:

[a] the name of the control,

where it was on the layout (x,y coordinate? track segment number?),

[c] the direction of the red and blue sides (from track direction/angle?),

[d] the name of the thing being controlled,

[e] the kind of thing being controled (switch, decoupler, power, signal),

[f] the red-blue-both setting for the control,

[g] the time delay value,

[h] the on-off-toggle setting,

power level setting, and

[x] whatever parameters I forgot to mention.

Right now, in select mode, you can right-click a control spot on the track to get the list of controls at that spot. If the list contained more information than the name of the control, that would be a HUGE improvement.

I love RuleTheRail. It is a truly amazing program. It is clear that lots of hours/days/nights of work have gone into. I’m having way more fun with this than I did with my Lionel gear many years ago. Keep up the good work.

Roger

[Anonymous]

Hi Roger,

I find that a very good idea with the controls list. That would really be a big help.

Kind regards,

Willi

[Anonymous]

Chris, Roger

Both great tracks I hope that I can get somthing intresting on my B T track in the goods yards. As I never really done goods yards. Passnger tracks are what I usually play with, they arn’t to hard trains just go from station to station. But goods yards neet to do somthing.

Cheers Dave

[Anonymous]

Hi Roger,

Quote:

The sidings have sidings and it is not nearly as orderly as the planners would want.

It may make more sense when the infrastructure is added. The switching task done in this layout is performed in the passenger train handling area. It’s a shame there isn’t an easy way to label the layout with info while construction is ongoing.

I had much of this yard completed prior to this latest version release but I managed to corrupt it when doing beta testing for Brainbomber so I’ve been in the process of rebuilding it since then. (Stupid me for not backing up the layouts I used for beta testing 😳 )

Quote:

I noticed that you made extensive use of time delays on your controls. This makes for less “wasted” motion in the yard. You can get the loco and car just clear of the switch that needs changing and then make the change.

That’s quite right. It is a two edged sword though. Any changes to the track or placement of cars/types of loco can and probably will impact control timing. I had to abandon much of the timing work I had done in the yard I am designing to break down and rebuild the local and regional coal trains due to the length of the overall operation and its complexity.

Quote:

It also looked like the control loco sometimes activated itself to get to the next step. Is that so?

Yes. I do this to overcome the time delay ‘limitation.’ The one run of the switcher back to it’s point of origin takes longer to perform (because of yard limits) than the max timing limit. So turning the control engine on and moving it to the next stop control effectively doubles the amount of time I can delay the next command to the actual layout.

Quote:

Your layout also has much more realistic scale speed for the loco.

Yes, I probably will never design a digital layout where loco speed cannot be controlled.

I agree that creating a crossreferenced listing of controls and what activitates them would be useful. My personal preference would be to a csv file so that I could more easily maintain the notes I’ve already appended to earlier versions of that file (such as a change listing if I wanted to roll back what I’d done at a particular control).

Thanks for sharing! I look forward to watching your layout grow.

Best regards, Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi Chris,Roger and Don,

If you dload my shunting yard on topic automatic shunting,you will see a digital shunting yard “without” controlertrack but it´s not without.

The way of the locos are different. Follow the locos with camera.

[Anonymous]

Hi Peter,

Thanks, I’ll take a look.

That’s a nice idea for an automated layout. Thanks for sharing it!

Regards, Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi chris,

you can integrate a controlertrack in parts on different places form a shunting yard to set controlsequence inbound. you can try it on a small up to medium yard. it´s equal digi or analoque. the effect is the same. 💡

[Anonymous]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for that tip.

Chris

[Anonymous]

Hi All shunting fans,

Now i´m working on a medium shunting yard for more trains.

if that complete i´ll set the url here. I´ll make more tech demos for Willi´s site.

[Author]

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