Blue Comet Shovel Coal.

Hi all,
I'm coming back to Trainz after being away for almost 10 years!

I just purchased Trainz 12 and since they had a sale on their Blue Comet I picked that up too.
I am a bit lost, however, on how I'm supposed to shovel coal. I have two sliders in the train controls on the lower right for coal and water. My understanding is that that's automatic shoveling/ injectors rates? Also I can't find documentation anywhere on which direction is which. I assume that toward the red indicator is slower and toward green is faster?

While feeling out the system, on my first run my coal level got low to about 30% and my boiler pressure dropped. According to the manual, I'm supposed to hit the spacebar and it will shovel more coal in. However, nothing happens. If I click on the menu option at the top of the screen and select "Shovel Coal" it will increase 1% for about every two times I click on it. That's a lot of menu clicking. Why doesn't the spacebar work? Perhaps I'm just missing a general concept. Can anyone clue me in?

-Dave

Good Afternoon Dave
You may have to press the space bar several times to see the coal-level increase. Each press of the spacebar is 1 shovel of coal, which may be more, or less, than 1% of the 'coal level'. If your spacebar isn't responding, then there may be a key assignment issue or possibly something else. I would suggest you send us a ticket on the helpdesk for this one ( http://support.trainzportal.com/ ).

For the sliders, the right hand slider is your main injector and the left hand slider is your 'automatic coal shoveling/stoker'. Moving the slider 'up' will increase the rate of coal or water. The rate will vary depending on the locomotive.

The 'coal' slider can be thought of as being like a mechanical stoker on some locomotives (it will, however, function on any loco). You may find that you need to still manually shovel some coal in if the 'stoker' isn't keeping up, as can occur on the prototype in some cases.

Regards

You can also hold spacebar down for a few seconds it'll shove roughly 3-8% every second it's being held down, that way you don't need to keep pressing it heaps to give it allot of coal, but you also don't want to hold it too long that you flood the firebox and kill the temp.

Apparently my copy of Trainz needed a computer reboot after installation. I could not get it to work at all, after a reboot everything worked as it should. I did note that that if you are in some camera view, chase view for example, that you must have the engine selected to add coal to the fire. If you have another part of the consist selected it won't work, which kind of makes sense.