Is there a way to shut off grade crossings manually while driving?

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
Sometimes these stupid things get stuck on active and won't self-cancel for any number of reasons. How can a human driver manually cancel a grade crossing signal that is on? Switching operations near a crossing is the main culprit for them not to automatically cancel when the track is clear after the train drives away. In a real railroad, a train crewman may have some manual control of these. Stopping a train at a station near a crossing is one reason to manually cancel so as not to hold up street traffic. Pulling in and backing out of turnouts, cutting or shunting near crossings is another reason 4-trigger ATLS crossings won't work right.

ATLS controlled 4-trigger crossings only reliably self-cancel whenever a train passes the entire block of crossing triggers on its set channel without stopping and backing up before clearing the whole block of triggers.
 
There is no way to simply shut OFF such crossing as by a mouse click or keyboard command?

I don't have yard freights. I have a figure 8 mainline with one switch leading to a small yard inside the long loop of the 8 with 10 Pullman heavyweights, 2 cabooses, a MOW truck,a speeder and 5 engines. This switch is located close to a grade crossing. The rolling stock has to move in and out the small yard to marshal the passenger excursion train for mainline operation. I have a new mini-route (one train board only) that is simulating an HO-scale model layout on a 172.50 sq. foot table. Table dimensions are 20' x 8' with a 3 1/2' x 3 1/2' extension board hanging off the back of the table. The figure 8 mainline curves have a 3' radius.

The mainline crosses over itself via a bridge that levels off following a 2.50% (maximum value) grade climb and then descends back down through an arc (semi-circular) tunnel on the smaller lobe of the figure 8. The tight confines for space on the train board dictates that the yard junction be close to the grade crossing. About 2/3 of the figure 8 is on a gradient. I figure a mainline curve of a 6-foot diameter to be the tightest practical for long-wheelbase Pullman heavyweights. There are curves in the yard somewhat tighter but they are short arcs.

I am actually using Trainz Surveyor to design and draw plans for a future physical HO layout which is to feature DCC operation. Before there were PC train sims, there were physical model railroads for hobbyists with lots of space and money.
 
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I have simple solution for this. It's not the most elegant but it works well.

Place an invisible junction lever and a short piece of invisible track pointing off in another direction. When you park your freight cars on the siding or in the yard, they do not affect the traffic. When you start switching, put the invisible switch lever into the active-track position, watch the gates go down and you can retrieve the cars from the siding.

If this is a road crossing that cuts through a yard, or crosses in the middle of some sidings, you need to put the invisible junction-setup on either side of the crossing.

To let myself know there's an invisible junction there, without seeing the arrows light up with a mouse over, I put a post of some kind next to the lever so I know it's there and I need to switch it before I move the train.

John
 
Actually, John, I have my "table-top" layout set up like this:

There is only one gated grade crossing. It is on the mainline just before the switch to the yard. At the start of the drive, all my rolling stock is stowed away INSIDE the yard itself. There are no train vehicles outside the yard in the beginning to initiate gate activation. So, I move my MOW truck out of the yard and onto the mainline to get it out of the way as it is parked in front of my road switchers. Next I drive out my mainline engines onto the mainline. Then I call upon my road switcher coupled pair to marshal the long passenger train as it is broken down over a number of dead-end sidings inside the yard. This whole assembly process cause train vehicles to move back and forth past the grade crossing repeatedly without clearing the trigger block completely to cycle the gates off again. In real American railroads, train crewmen would have some degree of manual control over nearby gates during such siding operations.

This is where Trainz once again fails to shine. Lack of direct manual human driver control over gates. Somebody, as much as I know, has not yet designed a manually-controllable grade crossing system for our game or a clever asset that would allow the ATLS system gates to be simply shut off by hand as by a mouse click over the gate itself or a keyboard command.

I could move train vehicles completely past the entire block of gate triggers, back and forth, during the marshaling operation, but that would look totally stupid and unnatural. The outer gate triggers are about 1,000 scale feet from the crossing on either side of it. The crossing is about 500 scale feet from the turnout into the yard where the train assembly in process has to move back and forth repeatedly to build the complete train or tear the train back down again. Half the game fun is shuffling rolling stock around the yard.

Also, since this is a mock-up of an HO train layout, the road car traffic is deactivated and static cars are on my layout's streets.
 
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The same invisible switch will work with ATLS crossings as well. Instead of putting the switch on your track, place it on the ATLS invisible track. Jointed Rail does this to disable gate activation on the Midwest Grain 3.0 route.

In Trainz, the traffic "Carz" are not really integrated into the activities of the railroad and serve mostly as eye candy to bring the environment alive. This means that the only thing they react to are gates and crossings, and to them trains, buildings, and even terrain if the road goes through the terrain, is invisible to the car traffic.

The alternative for you is to use train-car Carz. These are actually AI-driven trains that are really road vehicles instead. They move on "track" that looks like roads, and you can even have switches, and have trucks and buses load goods and people, and so on. It's another aspect of Trainz like airplanes that people have created over the years.

With these vehicles instead of the "fake" cars, you can then use the full ATLS trigger system to allow the traffic to move and only stop when they get to the gates. User Boat made a diamond-crossing controller system, which I think would work for you in this case.

The setup I explained in my initial post, is how I have things setup for my yard, which sits on a yard lead instead of directly on the mainline. This might be the difference because I can let the cars continue to cross the tracks while I leave cars on the yard lead as I pull them out of the stub-ended yard.
 
Ok, John

I placed a piece of invisible red track on the ATLS crossing eraser track along with an invisible lever rus. Supposedly, toggling this invis switch will toggle the gate on or off. Stand by for trial.
 
Standing by ... If a crossing gate is tripped by a trigger, it will continue to ring ... you can turn down your volume anytime you wish
 
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Just tried it. Only works reliably on my particular layout setup with two triggers: both an "arriving" trigger and a "leaving" trigger which is obsolete according to the ATLS instructions. This is OK since train traffic moves on my mainline loop in one direction only except to pull out of the yard turnout. I don't even think the invisible eraser track switch as an on/off toggle for the grade crossing is even necessary in this case. I will have to experiment with it some more. The 4-trigger/two-way mode does not work reliably for crossing gates near a shunting turnout. The trouble is that ATLS gets confused often when trains stop and back up inside the trigger block of a grade crossing set in 4-trigger/2-way mode. The gates can either get stuck down all the time or get stuck inactive all the time depending which triggers get run over in which order and in what direction. The ATLS crossing system is far from the grade crossing operational logic used by real railroads.
 
If a grade crossing gets stuck on ... send a Hi-Rail MOW crew to run over the section of track, resetting the trigger ... just like on the real RR (which Trainz ain't, as you have figured owt). Seems you always eternally have a weird problem turn up in Trainz, why is that ?

I have no cars, so I don't need no rail crossings I don't even know how to wire up a trigger, I don't even have any textures on my routes ... So I gotz' no problems wit' any of that high tech stuff !

I run Trainz uphill and have stalls, and downhill and have runaways, I place rotating trackside cameras, and watch the train operations, which is full of fun ... No problem
 
I just love that ding-ding sound of the crossing bell. The pitch starts out high then gradually goes lower as the train passes the crossing. Kinda neat eerie Halloween sound! Physics teachers call this the Doppler effect. Real railroads use the train's wheels and axles to complete an electrical circuit (the TRACK IS PART OF THE CIRCUIT) to activate the crossing. How the gate knows when to go back up again as soon as the ass end of the train clears the crossing is still a dazzling work of magic before mine eyes.
 
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I just love that ding-ding sound of the crossing bell. The pitch starts out high then gradually goes lower as the train passes the crossing. Kinda neat eerie Halloween sound! Physics teachers call this the Doppler effect. Real railroads use the train's wheels and axles to complete an electrical circuit (the TRACK IS PART OF THE CIRCUIT) to activate the crossing. How the gate knows when to go back up again as soon as the ass end of the train clears the crossing is still a dazzling work of magic before mine eyes.

The gates and bells really are neat. The Doppler-effect is actually a new thing which was introduced in TS12. Prior to this version, we had used assets that dinged constantly. What made it worse was the constant ringing was heard everywhere, all over the route, even 15 miles from the nearest crossing. They sounded nice, but the constant bell ringing is enough to drive the bats out of the belfry! The distant ringing bug was banished eventually I think in TS2010; though I can't remember now because it's been gone for so long it seems.

In the real world, they use relays and sensors placed on the tracks. The train completes the circuit through the wheels as you said then on the opposite side after the last car passes the sensor or switch on the other side, there's a bit of a time delay and the gates go up. The setup is pretty simple but effective and not unlike what your ATLS triggers are doing in some respects except there are no wires or electronics to complete the circuit in Trainz. That is the crux of the problem here. We can only emulate the actions of electro-mechanical devices visually because there are no connections...
 
The only difference is, real RR gates are much more reliable to work as they were intended to work than ATLS. Some alternative to ATLS for our Trainz game might someday be designed by a very, very clever software person. Railroad gates should only be down under a certain set of conditions and only up under another set of conditions. One practice on real railroads is to deactivate a crossing when the train is stopped at a passenger station nearby so as not to unnecessarily hold up road traffic. I believe the rules that govern crossing activation are implemented by a combination of electro-mechanical devices and human input (train crews) as well.

Even when the ATLS crossing (that is just the gates, bell sound and flashing red lights) is manually deactivated using your invisible lever, John, the damn triggers are still sensing the movement of train vehicles happening during nearby shunting activity. Pulling train cars in and out of a nearby yard, the wrong triggers are being run over in the wrong sequence and in which circumstances the train stops and reverses direction over these triggers which inhibits proper gate operation using the 4-trigger/2-way method. "Normal" operation of ATLS might not resume when the invisible lever turns the gates back on again. The gates either may stay stuck down or stay stuck up. I found that setting up two ATLS triggers for "arrive" (approaching the crossing at some distance ahead) and "leave" (having just passed the crossing immediately behind the train) respectively work for me without flaw and by using this method I can still shunt near the crossing and have normal crossing gate operation once the fully-assembled train is on the mainline and continuing to run the loop (in one direction only) on my closed figure 8 mainline layout which simulates a scale model train set. The 4-trigger/2-way mode just screws everything up when shunting takes place near the crossing. Shunting on top of an ATLS trigger block may confuse the devil out of it depending upon how it is laid out.

ATLS was mainly designed to have trains pass over the entire trigger block (the complete set of triggers on the same channel as the gate controller and slave) from end to end without backing up so the crossing gates can go through a complete cycle of down and back up again and reset itself for the next passing of a train.
 
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The only difference is, real RR gates are much more reliable to work as they were intended to work than ATLS.

True most of the time...

Where I used to live, the railroad was constantly fixing a particular set of gates. They would mysteriously go down and stay down which tied up traffic. Rather amusingly some of the drives would sit there and honk their horns as though that would make them go up sooner. Eventually people would go around or turn around. Then the cops would show up to direct traffic, and then the "T" came by to fiddle with the relay box.

The fiddly issue with the ATLS crossings is due to the fiddly nature of triggers. Triggers tend to work best if used once and in one direction. I noticed this myself while trying to get AI trains to blow horns for crossings. They would work fine in one direction but not the other on the single track. They would also sometimes blow the horn fine for the 'south' side of the crossing then repeat on the 'north side; while other times that would happen either. Eventually I gave up on it and lived without having realistic horns blowing. There are other ways to do this now, but this was back 12 years ago with TRS2004.
 
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Some alternative to ATLS for our Trainz game might someday be designed by a very, very clever software person.

You, perhaps?

ATLS was mainly designed to have trains pass over the entire trigger block (the complete set of triggers on the same channel as the gate controller and slave) from end to end without backing up so the crossing gates can go through a complete cycle of down and back up again and reset itself for the next passing of a train.

Thank you, captain.

I don't understand this thread. You gripe about ATLS limitations (to which limited workarounds are presented), describe in vivid detail how crossings work, tell us alot of things we already know but somehow after all these months of whinging, are unable to grasp the concept of Trainz =/= real life?


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One thing I can think of, is to lay a parallel track that completely bypasses the crossing but laid right over the actual track using an invisible spline. You need to be very very precise so trains don't appear to be floating or "derailed". The switch is a bit tricky but if the diverging is offset just by a little bit you can set it properly.
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Hi Jon,

Two things you can look at....

1 - You can set ATLS Triggers to react only to designated 'Train Priority' numbers. Set the trains you don't want the triggers to react to, to a different 'Priority'.

2 - You can manually add an ATLS Driver Command to the Driver Schedule. If you throw one in at the head of the queue it will be like the train has passed a green trigger, thus completing the sequence.

If you try option 2, you might do better to use the ‘obsolete’ Arrive and Leave system so you know where you are. It still works. It’s just less versatile.
Adding DC's on the fly can be a bit fiddly due to choosing the correct channel.... but it should work as a manual 'switch'.

Don’t forget that the system is expecting to see the same ‘Train’ go through all triggers, (that’s green triggers or driver commands). Switching with another train will confuse. As will splitting trains which gain new identities as you uncouple.

Hope that helps,

Boat
 
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