Minor Irritations

[rhban]

There are often minor irritations in this game - not just the latest version; it's something that unfortunately always seems to reoccur, and has happened to me in the past going right back to Trainz for Mac (I think like Trainz 12).
In my screen shot below, a train is completely stuck at a signal for no reason. You can see that the two signals are green and the two sets of points (switches) are all set correctly. Perhaps you can't see the second one properly, but that is where the track splits in two and the direction markers ensure the train can only go one way to the correct platform. So why is the train stopped? I have no idea, and will now have to make unnecessary changes to the track and markers until it behaves again. So irritating!

 

[pware]

No-one should ever believe that the "I" in "AI" stands for Intelligence.

I find that a workable solution to some of the "stuck AI" problems is often placing additional, but invisible, signals along the track. In the real world, while AI systems will usually find a solution faster and even come up with novel solutions that no-one had thought of before, they often lack the insight (or "instinct") that humans possess that can make the difference.

 

[Yorkshire]

I have occasionally had this type of issue. One thing I found was that if the command was 'drive to' or 'drive via', changing it on the fly to 'Autodrive to' or Auto drive thro' immediately took the train through. Not satisfactory but the session kept going.

 

[mtldrm38]

Directional markers you have to remember you can place em all you want but when a switch opens in a opposing directional marker you the train stalls because you will have to directional markers going the opposite way...

 

[JCitron]

Sometimes you can get important information why the AI are sitting at a signal by hovering your mouse cursor over the signal.

You'll see messages such as "Signal ahead is in an unknown state".

When you see this message, it means you may have to setup another signal ahead of the one in the distance, or maybe even try a different type of signal.

 

[rhban]

Sometimes you can get important information why the AI are sitting at a signal by hovering your mouse cursor over the signal.

You'll see messages such as "Signal ahead is in an unknown state".

When you see this message, it means you may have to setup another signal ahead of the one in the distance, or maybe even try a different type of signal.

What I mainly see is "track is unsignalled", which is often clearly untrue. I have also found that in some cases removing a signal helps.
In the case I am complaining about, I can manually drive my train without changing any switches over the offending piece of track and for the moment it is a puzzle. I think I am going to just replace or rebuild that entire piece of track and see what happens.

 

[rhban]

Ah! I should have guessed it would be something simple: there was an abandoned switch lever, presumably from an earlier version, and I couldn't see it among all the other switches and signals until I looked really closely. Good job I did, because I then found a missing lever farther up the line. So all's well, etc.