ATLS Assistance

[ctclark1]

Continuing on my A&A Route (in 2010 now)- As it is a small shortline (at present besides their tourist steam excursions they only have one customer at the end of the line) things are very low tech - all of their crossings are flag guarded by the conductor of the train, except for two on the main road through their home village - they use traffic lights to hold traffic while crossing (rather than make the guard walk into a busy roadway) as seen here:

This is one of those two, the other is set up almost identically. Two standard traffic lights on the road, and then (kinda hard to see) one 2-aspect traffic light facing each direction down the tracks (red over green only - you can see the back of one just to the right of the right-most traffic light). So far I've managed to get a somewhat close approximation using the ATLS components in the drawing below:

As of right now the two lights on the tracks are just standard ATLS Traffic lights on stands by Boat until I come up with a light that is better, everything is working relatively well as is, except for a few things outlined below.

• Is there any way to control the traffic lights from LCM mode without having them cycle to Phase 2 on a timer since there is no cross traffic on Route 2, only the train? (ie, only cycle when a train trips, without having to run 2 "phases" on their normal timer?)
• Right now, the only time the train is being allowed access to the crossing is when the standard phase times out, the SPL trip doesn't seem to be tripping properly. Based on the settings above (which are perfectly mirrored where indicated, I checked meticulously) is there anything that would be causing this? I was under the impression from everything I read about the SPL was that it would cause a special trip of the lights, not wait until the actual phase timeout. (I'm sure Boat and some others can figure out the settings just from the ATLS code, but I included the actual text for those not so savvy)

Also, if anyone happens to know of some two-color traffic lights that will work with ATLS that would be awesome, I've looked around the DLS pretty extensively with no luck, but that doesn't mean my search terms are perfect. The only other thing I could think would be to find a Vader-style gantry signal and modify it to fit on the poles and reverse the corona aspects (then try to use an inverse slave on the live tracks), but for someone who has never worked with modifying content like that it would be a bit rough, and still would look like a Vader signal, not a traffic light.

Any help on this would be awesome, or maybe a new method of trying this I didn't think of?

Thanks a bunch guys, I know I'm new here but just reading the forums has helped me a ton! (And thanks to Boat for the awesome traffic light system, and BNSF50 for some other crossing components I'll be using on the route, among other people... Most of the roads are going to be Maddy25's YARN as well)

 

[felix_g]

I had working something similar, but I can't find it anymore...
As I remember, I did set both phases to the minimum 5 secs, all 4 light dots to green, and the gap delay to zero. So in any case it doesn't take more than 5 seconds until activation of the red lights resp. the Traffic Stopper.
Hope this helps.

Felix

 

[felix_g]

Having read your post a 2nd time, I see now what causes some problems.
Usual practice (as far as I know) is not to assign a route to the RR tracks, but to the roads only.

The example I was talking in my 1st post:

Routes: 2
Phases: 2
Route 1: (G) (G) (SPL: R)
Route 2: doesn't matter at all...
Phase 1: 5 sec
Phase 2: 5 sec

So Route 1 changes from green to green every 5 secs., as soon as there is a train approaching and the cycle is over it will go to red.
Route 2 isn't needed at all.
RR tracks are controlled by an SPL signal.

Now if you want to go your way and use road traffic lights for the RR tracks too, you can... but I think there is no way to use trackside signals in that case, so that will not work for AI.

Routes: 2
Phases: 2
Route 1: (G) (G) (SPL: R)
Route 2: (R) (R) (SPL: G)
Phase 1: 5 sec
Phase 2: 5 sec

Route 1 assigned to road traffic... Route 2 is for the RR tracks traffic lights.

 

[ctclark1]

Right, I knew it was a bit out of the ordinary to assign a route just for the tracks without a road, but it was the only way I could see getting the traffic lights there. Also I hadn't thought about just running both normal phases as Green, I'll go try that now. I'll see what I can work out for the lights facing the tracks, I might just have to dive in head first and try my hand at modifying meshes too to get those working (via an Inverse Slave - tricky I know... I've read into the issue that can cause running it on live tracks and having a real train "connect" to it).

 

[stagecoach]

Sen City signals, these are train signals that have the option to work under ATLS.

 

[jordon412]

I have the same problem also, except I want to know if I can use the traffic lights in Level Crossing Mode (LCM) instead of railroad crossing signs. The route I plan on using this on also has signals on each side of the crossing, but they are dwarf signals, similar to the CNR 02 Dwarf signals made by tlanders, but I'm not planing on including them as part of the design of my railroad crossing. Is there a way to use traffic lights in LCM mode in place of railroad crossing signs?

 

[ctclark1]

Jordan, that was what I had originally tried, did not work as the traffic signals need to be assigned to a route, which there aren't any in LCM; My work around is kind of outlined above for the two crossings where I need it to model the real-life route I'm working on - Use the ATLS system in a normal mode and just use the SPL triggers far enough out to make sure traffic is stopped by the Stopper by the time you get there. If you do as Felix showed and set Route 1 to be green in both Phase 1 and Phase two with 5 second phase times, with the car route being red in the SPL phase, it should work, as long as your triggers are out far enough to catch the SPL route. Just know that with the 5 second phase times it may take up to 5 seconds to catch the SPL phase. For AI driving you would definitely want to put in the "Tram Stoppers" on SPL mode unless you want to risk your AI running through the cars. Keep in mind the major point about SPL mode still remains here - you can NOT reverse direction in between the triggers.

stagecoach, thanks for the tip on the Sen City signals, I'll take a look at them.

 

[stagecoach]

There is also an alternative you can use in the screenshot. Place the inverse slave between your two tram stoppers and delete those stoppers. You can now place any signal on either side in place of the stoppers. The inverse slave will show as an invisible train so the signals will show red. When ATLS is activated the invisible train will vanish and the track will be clear for the arriving train. You need to make sure that the train can clear the slave properly or the slave may reappear to early and derail your train. The signals need to be at least 20m either side of the slave so as to avoid a radius overlap.


The example I was talking in my 1st post:

Routes: 2
Phases: 2
Route 1: (G) (G) (SPL: R)
Route 2: doesn't matter at all... (SPL:G)
Phase 1: 5 sec
Phase 2: 5 sec

So Route 1 changes from green to green every 5 secs., as soon as there is a train approaching and the cycle is over it will go to red.
Route 2 Should be set for the tram stoppers which remain red and then go automatic when a train approaches.
Route 2 isn't needed at all.
RR tracks are controlled by an SPL signal. Set to route 2.

 

[ctclark1]

stagecoach, that was essentially my "plan b" of sorts, but something I had overlooked (and subsequently remembered when looking into the Sen City signals) was that signals of any type are trackside objects, whereas the control lights on proto are mounted to the traffic signal overhangs and therefore really don't line up with the tracks in any way that would allow the signals to mount correctly. The complexity at these crossings is to serve two purposes - the actual lights obviously for realism but also for manual driving, whereas the tram stoppers are for the AI... If it takes two separate components to do that, so be it; I just wasn't sure how to get that lined up at the start. I'm currently looking into what it would take to create the two-aspect traffic style signals, and then if I can make that happen I'll work with Boat to see what it would take to script them into ATLS (obviously a little ways off as I need to work on the actual imaging first, something completely new for me).

For now for route testing purposes I just have a standard 3-light ATLS traffic signal mounted in the appropriate spot and set up coinciding with "Route 2" which is red in both Phase 1 and 2, and only turns green on SPL events which coincides nicely with the tram stoppers also set to the SPL event. I do thank you for the idea of setting both normal phases to green for route 1, the thought hadn't occurred to me before and I hadn't realized that Boat thought of just about everything with these in that when a light has the same state between two concurrent phases it doesn't still try to go to yellow, which is cool and works great for my purposes so far so again I thank him for that and I thank all of you for your help thus far!

I've still got a ways to go with this route with scenery, buildings, and ground textures and my unofficial A.D.D. tends to get in the way as last night when I started out working on scenery I got sidetracked into trying to find the proper locos for this route (working on reskinning a 44-Tonner at the moment, but finding a 65-Tonner, as well as their Alco 2-8-0 and Baldwin 4-6-0 both with 3 domes has been proving difficult, all the 4-6-0's I can find on DLS are 2 domes and Alco 2-8-0s seem to be non-existant on DLS... but that's for a thread at a later time when I truly get to that point in the route).

Now to get myself back on track... I've always felt that A.D.D. isn't truly a disorder, its something we all have, it just differs in how well we control it, and my control over it gets worse the longer I'm awake lol.