Safety valves on steam locomotives - taming the noise?

philskene

Well-known member
I've searched the Forums and this comes up at frequent intervals over the last two decades. Unfortunately it is impossible, at least to the user, to reduce the sound of the safety valves blowing off on steam locomotives.

So I'm wondering what we can do to make N3V give us an option - maybe a volume control, maybe a none/soft/ medium/loud toggle.

Surely it can't be that hard?

What should we, the customer, do? Do we need a petition with ten thousand signatures? Go on strike? Promise to give all negative reviews? Refuse to do any beta testing? Complain to our local member of Parliament?

Phil
 
Yep - writing a letter to your local member always works!
Suppressing safeties often leads to boiler explosions, however.
 
Hi Phil,

Are you using cab mode or DCC? I've managed to work around it by using a more realistic volume and temp along with the speeds the cut-off is moved and can keep the boiler balanced between 70% and 80% working pressure in both Cab and DCC, Cab is trickier as light loads forces you to have low regulator and you'll be at 100% boiler most of the time and isn't controllable sadly, in DCC it is stable though, you just need to keep working the values, lol.

Cheers.
 
Hey guys,

Lets be serious for a moment, in real life the safeties stop the boiler from exploding, in trainz however I have seen steam physics with safeties going off at 250 PSI and still continue to climb in pressure to 400+ PSI which causes the safeties to be on no matter what, in real life the fireman has control how a locomotive steams based on the amount of coal shoveled, airflow and draw on the fire, in trainz you can't control this, the only way to try and keep the boiler from running out of control is a very high fire temp for working the loco and low temp for light working, in trainz people are not doing this, they have a high fire of 700 or so kalvin and a low fire of 500 kalvin which means efficiencies need to be high to generate steam, I use a max fire of 1800~1900 kalvin and low efficiencies to help balance it, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't.... I haven't played with TS19 however I have to assume it's the same as T:ANE with the steam physics.

Cheers.
 
Guys --

I don't mean doing away with the safety valves.

What I do mean is reducing or getting rid of the noise associated with them.

Yes, I drive in Cab Mode. Exclusively. The built-in C&O Kanawha K-4 is a wonderful locomotive, at least as far as appearance is concerned. But driving it, with the incessant noise of the safety valves blowing, is a nightmare. And it aint just the K-4. The same applies to almost all the steam enginespec available.

Now I don't object to the safety valves blowing -- I do know what they are for. I do object to the unbearable noise.

So, what we need is either a volume control to turn the noise down or a toggle to change the noise volume in several steps.
 
Come on Phil. Ivan see you're having a laugh. Don't be a dingbat!!

Just turn the volume down for pities sake and worry about important stuff.

The USA has Trump, the UK has BREXIT and half the World currently seems to be suffering with bad climate and plastic bags disasters.
 
When I drive in Cab Mode I want to be the engineer. Not engineer and fireman. Make the fireman do his job and let me do mine. It's his job to regulate steam pressure.
 
Go find out what the first person kill by a steam engine was doing.

Wasn't that William Huskisson who got cut in half by The Rocket at Rainhill trials?

But go re-read what Phil posted, he doesn't want to get rid of the safety valve feature just have the sound proportionate to the rest of those made by a steam loco.
 
Hi All
In all honesty, safety valves are loud. And the sounds will reflect this. It's possible in future that we might be able to add a volume control for this, but at the current time this isn't possible.

It should be noted that the enginespec should be relatively controllable, using the available controls in Trainz, to manage your boiler pressure. If you have them blowing off all of the time, then you have too much fire for the work you are doing. Additionally, your enginespec should be set so that the safety valves take at least a few seconds to bring the pressure back down. If they release too much too quickly (ie the flow rate), you'll cause them to repeatedly blow off for a short time, and this will keep happening till eventually the fire temperature drops. If the flow rate is too low, you'll get what is called 'accumulation' where the boiler pressure will continue to rise (this is a VERY valid problem on steam locomotives!).

It should be expected that, if you're working hard and then suddenly back off, your boiler pressure will rise and you'll blow off for a short time. But with suitable fire management, blower management, and water management you will only have this for a short time. But this is only if the enginespec's configuration is setup right (and this does require a LOT of testing to get just right).

I have, however, entered a feature request for a volume control to see if this can be done in future. But I can't say when or if this may actually be implemented.

One option for the more adventurous among us, in the interim, is that the sound is contained in asset <kuid:570470:100003> Sounds, which can be opened for edit, and 'obsoleted' (you cannot directly submit the asset). Note we cannot provide technical support for this, but it should be possible for those with asset editing experience to alter or replace the safety valve sound and creating an obsoleting version of the asset. It would, however, prevent multiplayer sessions from functioning...

Regards
 
Hi Zec --

Well, I've been adventurous.

Opened "Sounds" for "Edit in Explorer"
Copied the folder to an external location
Modified the kuid to 2:570470:100003:10
Edited the sound file with Audacity to -20dB
Dragged and dropped the file back into Manage Content
The original is obsoleted.​

I can now drive the C&O K-4 without the overpowering noise of the safety valves. The sound of (near) silence is wonderful.

Zec -- I can't thank you enough. It's really appreciated.

Phil
 
Back
Top