My very, very large mega-merger and acquisitions type route, wasn't linked together by portals and worked as a large system broken up into multiple divisions. I merged Deremmy's East Kentucky into:
- Coal Country
- Ozark Valley
- Midwest Grain
- American Intermodal
- Bits and pieces of my own 'tween boards
- Bits and piece of others
- Cold Creek - merged into Midwest Grain
- Evansville route by Deremmy
- Pennsylvania and Berwin.
- and one other very small route as a transition.
What the route represents is the transition from the Appalachian Mountains up the escarpment that separates the Ohio River and the flatter eastern Midwest. In real life this area is a bit west of where the East Kentucky route represents, but the terrain is similar, but does flatten a bit at the Ohio River region. Once the route crosses the escarpment, after climbing and tunneling, the terrain changes to the characteristic flatter, but still hilly eastern Ohio and Ozark region. What brought me to build this was trips through this region many years ago during storm-chases. We spent a chase trip in the Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio, region. After seeing that, I looked at building it myself but noticed these great routes were already there to merge.
From an operations standpoint, there are divisions as mentioned. Each section has it's own set of driver commands that are linked together as needed. Using the Schedule Library here was the utmost importance to separate the different sections. The Copy Commands from driver command proved to be a time saver for setting up driver schedules and for troubleshooting later on with the fix once and not worry later setup. There are three kinds of operations on this route. The first and foremost is through traffic from one of the many portals found on the route. This gives the route some online traffic on an otherwise long mainline. With the various through freights and passenger trains running, there is additional traffic including some commuter traffic on the Ozark Valley division between the larger cities, and of course lots of local switching, and coal mine operations that blend in nicely into this operation. This is in addition to the countless loose consists spread across the route to populate the world as it would be in real life.
The problem is it falls apart from an operation standpoint. The route was a bit smaller in TS12, but ran fine. In T:ANE things started to fall apart with drivers getting stuck, and in TRS19 things got worse. I went on a wholesale signal upgrade and change out and found that worked for a short time. Typical of Trainz... You test things a gazillion times and everything is fine, but as soon as you put it into production, everything falls apart again. In this case I'd fix one area, tweak something, add or remove a signal in my testing, and that area would work fine there, but with the problem showing up in another location.
The problem is stuff got slower, and slower, and slower over time with the drivers eventually getting stuck at green signals and at junctions set in their favor. Pressing pause periodically will clear the block and the drivers continue as if nothing happened to a point. After awhile everything slows down, and at that point stuff has to be saved, exit, and reloaded. This process, however, has its own ball of ants to deal with. Signals take time to come back on and initialize so drivers SPAD like crazy. Drivers also ignore signals, junctions, track marks, and direction markers causing all kinds of other messy things to occur. In the end it's a case of the whole system collapsing in on its self. I brought this up with N3V a couple of times, and finally the QA Team discovered a code problem that's causing this issue. I don't know if the problem has been solved yet, but it's on my list to try with Trainz Plus. Hopefully this issue has been addressed.
Thinking about this now, perhaps if the system is just too big to handle, and therefore things are collapsing on its self. Perhaps I should rethink this and revisit iPortals, which I have never gotten to work in the past. Since the route is divided into divisions, I can easily split it up so that each separate sub-route is its own entity.