Is there a limit on Enhanced Interlocking Tower paths?

[davidbird]

I am using pguy's Enhanced TRC3 invisible Interlocking Tower <kuid2:61392:8101:78> to control a complex junction.

I encountered a problem at around 35 paths within a single tower, where the tower would return a script error and then lose all entered path definitions. I gather there is a limit of around 350-400 path objects within a tower, (an update to increase this is "coming soon" - thanks Pierre for all your work in this!)

The way around this is to use several towers with the "dynamic ownership" option enabled. I have ended up with 7 (yes severn!) seperate towers covering the same area.

This worked sucessfully with 6. When I added the 7th tower, I have encountered problems with paths not being activable. Towers Manager reveals this is due to some path objects being "owned by another tower", despite the dynamic ownership option enabled and no paths active within the other tower/s.

Anybody have any ideas?

 

[pware]

I have had a single EIT with as many as 70 paths without any problems - most of the paths were short with few objects.

 

[pguy]

Hi Davidbird.

I confirm that there is actually a limit of about 320 path objects within a tower ; above this value when you edit your tower the routine in charge of saving your edition or restoring the previous version before edit may encounter a script timeout error causing the loss of all paths definition. This applies to all towers either EITs or standard N3V towers.
I am working to find a solution to avoid these scripts timeouts in a future version, but currently avoid more than 320 path objects in the same tower.

About your path not being activable due to some path objects owned by another tower, look at the path details page in tower manager rule, you should have the list of all path objects needed for the path with their current owner and lock state. Check if there is path object owned by another tower or not and if owned by which other tower.

Regards.
Pierre.

 

[davidbird]

Hi Davidbird.

...

About your path not being activable due to some path objects owned by another tower, look at the path details page in tower manager rule, you should have the list of all path objects needed for the path with their current owner and lock state. Check if there is path object owned by another tower or not and if owned by which other tower.

Regards.
Pierre.

Thanks Pierre. I have opened up the Towers Manager, and this does tell me that there are some path objects owned by another tower. However all towers have the "dynamic ownership" option enabled and none of the other towers have any paths active. Unless I am mis-understanding the "dynamic ownership" option, I am at a loss to work out what is happening.

Edit. I am wondering if the EIT object has become corrupted in a minor way, as it did work perfectly until I added the 7th tower for the area. Even with this removed, the error (if it is an error) persists.

 

[stagecoach]

An object can only be controlled by one tower because towers do not link with each other. If a tower path crosses a path from another tower you need to use the exclusive set in both towers. This allows only one tower to be in charge.

 

[davidbird]

Edit. I am wondering if the EIT object has become corrupted in a minor way, ....

So I went to delete the EIT from CM, and found that it was Open For Edit, although I had never opened it directly. I deleted it, and all it's non-builtin dependencies. Ran a Database Rebuild and re-installed the EIT from the DLS.
Now my session was showing faulty dependencies, and these turned out to be the Towers Manager rule. Again deleted and re-installed this.

Now, when Towers Manager is opened in a Driver Session, it is giving me a warning that one tower is exceeding its limit of path objects - which it was not doing before. So next stage is to split that into 2 seperate towers.

Will report back.

 

[pware]

For very complex yards I add two EITs. One controlling all the western paths in and out, the other controlling all the eastern paths. There is no overlap between the areas of control so there is a sort of "no mans land" between the two which has no signals or switches. It works.

 

[davidbird]

I have installed a beta-test copy of the v86 EIT library. This seems to solve all the problems.
Back to route building after a frustrating couple of days!