Enhanced Interlocking Towers (EIT) - Route or Session Level?

[boleyd]

I have setup EIT paths at various times, mostly to see what happens. Since I am not at the level of a dozen (12) trains sharing a network over a 24 hour workday, I found no use for them. Now, apparently they are needed as a foundation for a timetable management system of a railroad. So back to EITs.

I realized that one foundational question I had missed - Session or route? That is, do you install this system at the route or session level? Or, are the "golden pathways" at the route level and the rules governing their application at the session level?

 

[pguy]

Hi Dick.

My personal recommandation is to implement Interlocking Towers, either standard N3V ones or EITs, at the session level and not at the route level.

There has been for now quite some time a bug with ITs defined at the route level, where the internal data was correctly saved with the route data the first time it was saved, but was incorrectly saved with the session data for later saves … and this leads to some incoherent situations difficult to understand and debug where the IT internal data is partly saved in the route level and partly in the session level. To avoid such situations, it is much easier to have all the ITs and its internal data at the session level, where everything remains coherent.

Of course this may mean that instead of creating a second, third, … new session from scratch you will need to duplicate your initial session if you wish to retrieve in the new session all the paths definition existing in the initial base session.

Hope this may help.
Regards.

Pierre.

 

[pwjohnson]

Hi Pierre,

As you know, I've been getting some weird non-reproducible errors with Enhanced Interlocking Towers. I have defined them at the route level, so in view of your post above it would be sensible to follow your advice and have them defined them at the session level. With luck these problems might then go away...

Do you think it will be OK to just click on Properties for each tower and change from route to session level? Or might that still leave some loose ends lurking underneath?

Thanks!

Regards, Peter

I always forget to include this: I'm on TRS19 100240.

 

[pguy]

Hi Peter.

Editing each tower property to replace route layer assignment by session layer assignment should be enough to have all the towers internal data at the session level.

But from the screenshots of your problems I have looked at I don’t expect that placing your towers in the session layer will solve them. To go further debugging your remaining problems, you need first to toggle debug option for all your towers and take a new screenshot of the not activating path details run time monitor page when the problem occurs. with debug active, the path details page should display some more precise diagnostic on why the path did not activate. and if it is not sufficient to find the cause, the only way to go further is a copy of your problematic route and session, so that I can repro the problem and trace in the script code why the path did not activate. that is the most efficient method to go further on your problems.

Regards.
Pierre.

 

[pwjohnson]

Hi Pierre,

You were right that putting the ITs into the session layer would not solve my path problem. I will run it with debug as you suggest and send it to you by PM. (I'm also having problems with consuming portals getting blocked but that's not for this thread!)

Regards, Peter