pondering operations

WillPac

Willamette Pacific RR
As my Southern Pacific valley main line (Portland to Salem at least, possibly as far south as Albany or Eugene), and the Tillamook Branch almost complete, I have begun to think about operations. (Okay, the line really isn't THAT close to completion, as I plan on having this route in three different eras, and I am still working on 19540--the earliest time frame.)

But I have fiddled with the Driver tutorials, plus tested some of my own layout and was puzzled by the driver commands for freight and commodity movement. They could "load" or "unload", which works okay, but at least here in the US is NOT how the RRs operate! I was wondering if there was a rule that would let me have a train drop off empties, then pick up cars that had been loaded already. Very VERY few trains have ever waited for cars to be loaded or unloaded (the unit trains for stuff like coal are the exception, with their load/unload on the fly capability).

Is there a rule that will do what I described above? I was looking around DLS (which is coming to a sad end for us 04/06 users, but let's not open THAT can of worms!) and ran across someone's session or scenario or layout or whatever that said that LARS industries can and will load/unload cars, even if no engine is present.

Can someone verify this? And if so, does that mean that those industries included with the game (mines, lumber mill, pulp mill, brewery, etc.) will NOT do as the LARS ones do? What is my best option there on any non-LARS industries? Zero out production/consumption on those tracks and put LARS tracks within these industries? Thanks in advance for any direction you can give.
 
As I understand it, the ProtoLARS track will load/unload cars even when the engine is doing other stuff, but you still have to instruct the train where to drive to and stop, to uncouple from the cars, and then to go and couple with the loaded cars and continue on it's way. (There are various commands to couple/uncouple cars. On an experiment I did (having a switcher try to put together a passenger train for another locomotive to couple to) I used UnCouplezFrom <kuid:66277:80005> and Couple <kuid:-3:10081> which are both built-in commands in TS2010 and ought to be compatible with Trainz versions all the way back to TS2004.
 
The prototypical operation of drop off empties and pick up loaded cars later is implemented in Protolars by TPR. Good description at this link:
http://www.virtualrailroader.com/ProtoLARS.html

Bob

That is what I was hoping, Bob. I have pretty much all of the LARS industrial tracks (a few are missing deps, but I haven't worried much about those). And looking at the old article about LARS written back in '04, the writer touched on one model RR method of ops I used and plan to use again with Trainz, the good ol' car card system. Now if I can just fix that tunnel problem on the Tillamook branch...
 
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