Questions Regarding Working with Canted Tracks and Banking Rule Setting

[NJCurmudgeon]

This is a follow-up to the question I had posted yesterday regarding running trains on canted tracks. I learned that I needed the banking rule to get the trains to bank into the curves. I have been doing some experimenting and have a couple of questions I hope someone can answer or at least point me to a good tutorial...

- It appears that the banking rule is applied regardless of speed or degree of curve. A steep banking on a canted track looks natural for a high speed train at 120 mph. It looks like a drunk train when it does it on a gentle curve into a station. Is this a correct characterization? Or am I just missing something?

- I have been experimenting with the ctMRT canted tracks by 'fatuli' (I have yet to finish downloading the rest). They have some extreme canting, so I tried running a train at 120 mph with the banking rule set to the max of 3.000. While it did bank nicely, the wheels still hovered over the lower rail. There are other tracks canted less, so I will try them when I finish the downloads. But that will be time-consuming trial and error - is there a rule of thumb regarding what cant amount works with what banking setting? Are there any tutorials about how to work with those tracks? There are a large variety and I'm not sure which would work best for what application.

- Is there a way to cant catenaries? Or is it a matter of placing single track catenaries and then adjusting the spline node heights all the way along the curves for each track?

Thanks for any help with this!

 

[gfisher]

Its been a while since I fooled around with this, but I seem to remember that it is the degree of curve that sets the tilt of the consist. This can lead to some silly looking trains on tight slow speed curves. It is all a bit of a fudge. For that reason I usually set my consists to about 1 degree of tilt, enough to see but not enough to make the problems too apparent. I also seem to remember that it was the ouside wheel of the truck that "raised" when into the curve. I think your second sentence is correct about catenaries. If you are interested, I did some banked track and the splines leading in to the banking. You can find them at USLW.

 

[NJCurmudgeon]

Thanks gfisher. I played with the train banking using a flat (non-canted) track and it looks kinda convincing. Makes me wonder if I need a canted track after all? What name are your tracks under?

By the way, does anyone know how to use the Guide Curve 1.25 Degree LG (and other similar curve guides) by mr.den? They look like what I need for part of my layout, but when I place them, the start misbehaving...I can only sometimes select them to move and rotate them into position and then when I zoom in to align it, it disappears and only reappears when I zoom out and can no longer select anything!