Operating on the Winter UMR route

[Gary25b]

I'm enthused about the potential for operations on the UMR Winter route, and would enjoy hearing from others, including the route creator, on their own plans or scheme for such operations.

I'm just now going over the route in some detail, looking at the possible flow of products, location of sorting yards, engine service, etc. Since I just got the route yesterday, I'm just getting started, going from west to east on the route.

So far, Travis Yard looks like the best prospect for a sorting yard on the westernmost portion of the route. I'm envisioning Travis as a terminus for regional freight trains coming from off-map, and as the departure/terminus for local trains in the western area.

While working my way east from Travis, in my review of the route, I'd be very interested in other players' ideas.

 

[dphorton]

I downloaded the route without any problems. But getting all the assets is another thing. I can not get the Download Cart to put everything in CM2. It is very frustrating to say the least. Today I have not been able to get the Download Page to work either. I thought that Train-Sim was bad but this is worse. :'( I have been trying this for the last 5 days. Hope everyone else has better luck. However I am half way around the world. Anyone with any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I have even disable my firewall and it is still the same.

Dave Horton

 

[fran1]

I downloaded the route without any problems. But getting all the assets is another thing. I can not get the Download Cart to put everything in CM2. It is very frustrating to say the least. Today I have not been able to get the Download Page to work either. I thought that Train-Sim was bad but this is worse. :'( I have been trying this for the last 5 days. Hope everyone else has better luck. However I am half way around the world. Anyone with any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I have even disable my firewall and it is still the same.

Dave Horton

You don't need to disable anything. Put planetauran.com as a trusted site in internet options, in firewall, exceptions add your version of trainz from the drop down list. Should help a little.

 

[MountE]

Travis is a good size yard. Haven't checked but there was a a big yard near Clarksville on the east side. I ran a passenger train yesterday( added to Basic Session) from Grantly to Gladstone it listed 248 miles when done. I been going through trying to find out any difference with the old UMR which stoped at Gilby.
I also have been opening the industries to see just what products they use.
I hope that having trackmarks in the session layer will give more control over the IA.

Rob

 

[Paul_Bert]

I downloaded the route without any problems. But getting all the assets is another thing. I can not get the Download Cart to put everything in CM2. It is very frustrating to say the least. Today I have not been able to get the Download Page to work either. I thought that Train-Sim was bad but this is worse. :'( I have been trying this for the last 5 days. Hope everyone else has better luck. However I am half way around the world. Anyone with any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. I have even disable my firewall and it is still the same.

Dave Horton

I assume you are using TS2010 for this route. There are lots of assets that need to be downloaded and it takes a while for this to happen especially during the day. I live in TN and find that after 10pm CST the downloads work very well. (Most of the rest of the world is asleep I guess). Try night time downloads and see if this helps.

All of the UMR routes are superb. They will tax your computer unless you have a pretty good processor and graphics card.

Also look under TS2010 and you will see discussions regarding this route and where to find the two missing assets.

 

[Gary25b]

I'm still not through the whole route and have four full pages of destinations. Many different possibilities for operations.

Unit trains for coal, wheat, barley, petroleum products, Container, autoracks, wood chips, in map and from off-map. Mixed trains for all of these products.

Passenger, of course, from Express to local, although there is no major passenger station that I've found.

Engine service and MOW.

Mixed freight, regional and local, for general goods, cattle, lumber, Aviation fuel, transformers, and more.

Sorting yards at Travis and Millhurst. The route could use a bigger yard, I'm thinking, but those are decent.

One could easily make operations quite complex, but I'll probably just make up a set of cards and wherever I am on the route, draw a card and see if it makes sense to do as directed on it in that location. If anybody has a simple system to simulate operations I'd love to hear about it. Perhaps instead of cards I could just randomly choose from the waybills feature in Trainz itself.

 

[MountE]

The large yard near Clarksville called Grey Yard in earlier versions is gone. Most of the towns do have 2 sidings however that can be used for sorting.

The waybills are only generated by an industry, I don't think Min of Lars will show needs will show in waybills. There is a rule that displayed the status of all industries including lars and min but I haven't tried in 2010 yet. Sometimes it would list the location but would call the product "unknown".
I've used it in09 on the Midwest Central.

Rob

 

[Gary25b]

Learning Trainz as I go, and just read about the use of Portals. So I'm thinking one way to operate this route is to set up miscellaneous consists, some unit trains, some mixed freight, even passenger trains, start them at one portal or another, running under AI to another portal. Then by whimsy I can take control of one of those trains wherever I find it on the route, and start operating it as a local, through train, whatever.

Is that the way Trainzers generally operate? Or with more planning?

 

[MountE]

There's no right or wrong way to run sessions in trainz. They can run from the detailed sessions like the ones for the Downtown Traction route to simply dropping a consist on the route and driving.

On the UMR what I like to do is setout some cars at different industries in a local area. Then make up a ai consist that will come to the siding and drop some cars. I'll use an engine to swap the cars from the ai consist with the cars at the industries. From there you can add more consists to make the session more realistic.

Whatever you find fun is the way to go.

Rob

 

[dphorton]

Thanks everyone for their help.

Dave Horton