Entire route waiting for track clearance

After doing quite a few modifications to my route in surveyor no train is able to move. They're all waiting on track clearance.

There is something majorly wrong because even when i remove all rolling stock bar one engine it still waits for clearance.

Any ideas?

your signals are probley doing it.
possibly one loco is in the way of another so the signal shows red and then that ones in the way of another one and so on.
wierd wait you only got rid of the rollingstock right? placement of the signals is another major factor, that could be causing it too.

TDMs. Track Direction Markers. Are you using them? They solve a lot of problems since it matters to the AI which way you lay track. If you have them, make sure there aren't any in backwards.

You may need to check all the levers are in the correct position. If one is just on the wrong side of the spline it may show up as looking ok but in fact wont work. Are any signals or levers controlled by a rule as this can cause problems if not set right.

hi cableguy

i now use only the signal 004 or 005

they seem to give me the least amount of problems

how are you placing your signals as that has a big effect on AI??

cheers
steven

hi
draw a sketch of how you place your signals please
thanks
steven

it sounds like a signal problem or a turnout (switch) problem. Place your pointer over the signal in front of your train and see what message you get. Also, check your switch lever locations. They can be awfully tricky sometimes. Make sure there's not a signal between the lever and the points of the turnout. I like to place my levers just outside the turnout spline circle. This seems to work pretty well for me.

Reboot fixed it.

It wasn't just one signal, it was the entire route.

No train would move even an inch right from the start of the session.

Quitting trainz and running it again resulted in the same problem, but a reboot fixed it, weird ey.

yeah, weird

There's nothing weird about that. There are times when a reboot will fix a multitude of sins. Remember the Dilbert cartoons? Dogbert is sitting at the helpdesk, and his choice phrase to anyone that called is "Shutup and Reboot!"

In reality, as you've seen, bits of program code can get scrambled in memory (RAM not permenant storage), and then all hell breaks loose from annoyances such as this (it's all relative of course to the problem), to complete failures of programs where they need to send a message to Microsoft or some other unknown entity.

What happens in many cases is that the code gets stomped on by some other errant program that forgets what memory-space has been allocated to it. The errant program overwrites a little bit of some other program's code, usually the more important one that you are running, and then the program that was innocently being over written gets confused when it reads someone else's bits.

Anyway, rebooting a system often is one of the ways of getting around this problem especially with Windows, where many applications are known to suffer from memory leaks as well, and use up space that is needed by other applications.

John

Can any one tell me if there is a set distance between signals or what the distance should be ??

The lengths of blocks are designed to allow trains to operate as frequently as possible. A lightly used line would have a block many miles long while a passenger or commuter line would have one every mile or so.

Waiting for track clearance

I had a simlar problem with a train coming out of a portal. it would come out and just wait even though the route was put in. It turned out with the alterations i had done to the track i had a badly joined track further done the line.

weejock said:

Can any one tell me if there is a set distance between signals or what the distance should be ??

Click to expand...

I set mine up to be about the length of the 3000T US Coal consist. When I setup a long stretch of double-track, I put my coal consist at the beginning, and place my signals a short distance ahead of the last coach. I then move the consist ahead of the placed signals and repeat the process.

This procedure came out of trial and error to get the smoothest operation of my AI trains. I found that for my heavily traveled mainline I needed to do this. For my lesser traveled line, I place my signals a bit further apart, but still close enough so that the AI drivers don't get scared and run at half speed. This distance is quite more than the 3000T coal, but I can't really tell you what it is.

John

Thanks for all your help have a good day "weejock"