Longest routes and capacity

I think here in Gt Britain we have an advantage due to the great passenger system we have and most Trainzers here into the passenger side of things. Although have had a log break from my rather adventurous train project in Ulster and extension south earlier in my Trainz time I slowly built the former tramway system that closed here in Glasgow back in the early 1962. It was the largest outside of London in it's day and almost 140 miles all over the pace. On the passenger side i think it makes me less inclined to be tempted like John to snooze off!

ps Have a passing look folks.....
www.glasgowtramsim.moonfruit.com

www.northernirelandrailwaysim.moonfruit.com



Now going to waken him up!
 
I also had a route in TS12 that was made from a number of routes merged on the same map but not physically joined.
I used portals between each route.
I could travel from Los Angeles to Chicago and then to the west coast.
It had 47 portals and took more than 5 minutes to load.
Mike
That would be really feasable if you used many small diorama's, all joined together, joined with a tunnel separating them, or a backdrop background (like NTrack modules do), separating the East Coast, from the Midwest, the Central, the West Coast, and the entire cross country route could be as small as 4 baseboards long (or a tad longer).
 
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I have a route consisting of most if not all of the Southern NSW themed routes merged into a single route.
It includes over 1600Km of mainline and rural branch lines and weighs in at 450Mb in TANE Content Manager.
It loads quickly and runs easily on my modestly equipped PC.
Ive run consists on all branch lines and mainlines up to 40 at the same time and it runs fine in TANE and even better in TRS2019.

PG
 
The route was feasable and worked really well and was made up from large routes including Dermmy's Clovis, Montana Rail link, Mojave Sub Division, Cajon Pass Extreme and Sherman Hill.
Cheers,
Mike
 
My very, very large mega-merger and acquisitions type route, wasn't linked together by portals and worked as a large system broken up into multiple divisions. I merged Deremmy's East Kentucky into:

- Coal Country
- Ozark Valley
- Midwest Grain
- American Intermodal
- Bits and pieces of my own 'tween boards
- Bits and piece of others
- Cold Creek - merged into Midwest Grain
- Evansville route by Deremmy
- Pennsylvania and Berwin.
- and one other very small route as a transition.

What the route represents is the transition from the Appalachian Mountains up the escarpment that separates the Ohio River and the flatter eastern Midwest. In real life this area is a bit west of where the East Kentucky route represents, but the terrain is similar, but does flatten a bit at the Ohio River region. Once the route crosses the escarpment, after climbing and tunneling, the terrain changes to the characteristic flatter, but still hilly eastern Ohio and Ozark region. What brought me to build this was trips through this region many years ago during storm-chases. We spent a chase trip in the Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, Ohio, region. After seeing that, I looked at building it myself but noticed these great routes were already there to merge.

From an operations standpoint, there are divisions as mentioned. Each section has it's own set of driver commands that are linked together as needed. Using the Schedule Library here was the utmost importance to separate the different sections. The Copy Commands from driver command proved to be a time saver for setting up driver schedules and for troubleshooting later on with the fix once and not worry later setup. There are three kinds of operations on this route. The first and foremost is through traffic from one of the many portals found on the route. This gives the route some online traffic on an otherwise long mainline. With the various through freights and passenger trains running, there is additional traffic including some commuter traffic on the Ozark Valley division between the larger cities, and of course lots of local switching, and coal mine operations that blend in nicely into this operation. This is in addition to the countless loose consists spread across the route to populate the world as it would be in real life.

The problem is it falls apart from an operation standpoint. The route was a bit smaller in TS12, but ran fine. In T:ANE things started to fall apart with drivers getting stuck, and in TRS19 things got worse. I went on a wholesale signal upgrade and change out and found that worked for a short time. Typical of Trainz... You test things a gazillion times and everything is fine, but as soon as you put it into production, everything falls apart again. In this case I'd fix one area, tweak something, add or remove a signal in my testing, and that area would work fine there, but with the problem showing up in another location.

The problem is stuff got slower, and slower, and slower over time with the drivers eventually getting stuck at green signals and at junctions set in their favor. Pressing pause periodically will clear the block and the drivers continue as if nothing happened to a point. After awhile everything slows down, and at that point stuff has to be saved, exit, and reloaded. This process, however, has its own ball of ants to deal with. Signals take time to come back on and initialize so drivers SPAD like crazy. Drivers also ignore signals, junctions, track marks, and direction markers causing all kinds of other messy things to occur. In the end it's a case of the whole system collapsing in on its self. I brought this up with N3V a couple of times, and finally the QA Team discovered a code problem that's causing this issue. I don't know if the problem has been solved yet, but it's on my list to try with Trainz Plus. Hopefully this issue has been addressed.

Thinking about this now, perhaps if the system is just too big to handle, and therefore things are collapsing on its self. Perhaps I should rethink this and revisit iPortals, which I have never gotten to work in the past. Since the route is divided into divisions, I can easily split it up so that each separate sub-route is its own entity.
 
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Hello JCitron

You said:

''The problem is it falls apart from an operation standpoint. The route was a bit smaller in TS12, but ran fine. In T:ANE things started to fall apart with drivers getting stuck, and in TRS19 things got worse. I went on a wholesale signal upgrade and change out and found that worked for a short time. Typical of Trainz... You test things a gazillion times and everything is fine, but as soon as you put it into production, everything falls apart again. In this case I'd fix one area, tweak something, add or remove a signal in my testing, and that area would work fine there, but with the problem showing up in another location.

The problem is stuff got slower, and slower, and slower over time with the drivers eventually getting stuck at green signals and at junctions set in their favor. Pressing pause periodically will clear the block and the drivers continue as if nothing happened to a point. After awhile everything slows down, and at that point stuff has to be saved, exit, and reloaded. This process, however, has its own ball of ants to deal with. Signals take time to come back on and initialize so drivers SPAD like crazy. Drivers also ignore signals, junctions, track marks, and direction markers causing all kinds of other messy things to occur. In the end it's a case of the whole system collapsing in on its self. I brought this up with N3V a couple of times, and finally the QA Team discovered a code problem that's causing this issue. I don't know if the problem has been solved yet, but it's on my list to try with Trainz Plus. Hopefully this issue has been addressed.
Thinking about this now, perhaps if the system is just too big to handle, and therefore things are collapsing on its self''


Fair enough, same problems i have, as you know, too. Finally a fair word

regards
celje
 
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Is it possible that N3V explain this confusion.

Will N3V repair TANE and TRS19, so this problems wiil not show ( post #26) or they insist on statement: ''The current TRS19 is the most stable "new release" version of Trainz we've ever released''.
Which mean ( my opinion) that nothing is needed for repair, who cares, new edition TRS20 is coming, so we have to endure these couple of months.
 
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My very, very large mega-merger and acquisitions type route, wasn't linked together by portals and worked as a large system broken up into multiple divisions. I merged Deremmy's East Kentucky into:

- Coal Country
John I guess this is the JR version of Coal Country. But just maybe you found a way to merge N3V's version. I can hope anyway.

They said you can now edit payware in TS19 - just clone it.

Cloned payware is unmergeable in TS19. Oh my mistake I didn't see what wasn't in the small print.

@Celje I can bash them when they deserve it. TS19 might be their most stable release but it has bugs and it still as far as I'm concerned lacks a "new" feature I paid for back in TANE KS.
new edition TRS20 is coming
more like TS22 isn't it?

Bob Pearson
 
..I can bash them when they deserve it....
Bob Pearson


It's not my intention to bash anyone, i simply wish that my 9 years work still stay useful. I have put a lot of effort into these years so it is not easy for me to say let it go. ( as you said: ''we have to move with it or get left behind'')
 
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Hi there.

I am looking for very long routes such as the Montana rail link so if you have any please give me the name to search for. Also in Surveyor I'd like to know what is the number limit of "grids" that can be put together in a single route. Also is there a limit on the number of objects/tracks that the game support in a single session?

tks.

It doesn't help you right now, but before the end of the year I am intending to release a route onto the DLS that will start with the name DSEPR02......(see below).

It's about 390 km (234 miles roughly) from end to end, with scenery drawn to about 8 baseboards either side of the line. It runs quite smoothly in TANE on a 4 year old computer. I will add you to the list of people to notify when it is done.
 
It doesn't help you right now, but before the end of the year I am intending to release a route onto the DLS that will start with the name DSEPR02......(see below).

It's about 390 km (234 miles roughly) from end to end, with scenery drawn to about 8 baseboards either side of the line. It runs quite smoothly in TANE on a 4 year old computer. I will add you to the list of people to notify when it is done.
Just a bare bones, un-detailed route, 234 miles long, and 16 baseboards wide, is very, very wide, and may be much, much too large in file size TB's, for the DLS to accommodate
 
Just a bare bones, un-detailed route, 234 miles long, and 16 baseboards wide, is very, very wide, and may be much, much too large in file size TB's, for the DLS to accommodate

Ok, I presented the info wrongly - it is actually 4 baseboards either side of the line for a total of 8, plus the board the line is on. So 9 wide total.

I used CM's "open for edit" function to check it's current size, and in raw uncompressed format it is currently showing as 751 MB (777 MB on disk). I used 10m terrain grid away from the tracks, but 5m grid below the track, which may have helped keep the filesize down.

I can remove maybe 5-10% of the baseboard total if needed in unmodelled areas, but I have been led to believe that this size is within the current limits of the DLS system to handle. Would that still be the case do you think?
 
Ok, I presented the info wrongly - it is actually 4 baseboards either side of the line for a total of 8, plus the board the line is on. So 9 wide total.

I used CM's "open for edit" function to check it's current size, and in raw uncompressed format it is currently showing as 751 MB (777 MB on disk). I used 10m terrain grid away from the tracks, but 5m grid below the track, which may have helped keep the filesize down.

I can remove maybe 5-10% of the baseboard total if needed in unmodelled areas, but I have been led to believe that this size is within the current limits of the DLS system to handle. Would that still be the case do you think?

This is raw size of the route. When a CDP is created, because that's how a route gets uploaded, the package reduces to about 50% so that would make CDP about 400 MB. That's still a big route and might give people the jitters as it downloads. Remember this is only the route and then the dependencies have to follow from the DLS. For those on slow connections, this might be a problem.
 
Actually the route GND file (which has all you route map and assets) that probably is so extremely large, that it can not possibly "Save To A CDP", and is most probably much, much, too gigantically large, in TB's file size, that the DLS will not be able to upload/download it, and receive it, for posting on the DLS.
 
This is raw size of the route. When a CDP is created, because that's how a route gets uploaded, the package reduces to about 50% so that would make CDP about 400 MB. That's still a big route and might give people the jitters as it downloads. Remember this is only the route and then the dependencies have to follow from the DLS. For those on slow connections, this might be a problem.

Thanks John. It was intended to be a big route and so it is. It won't get much bigger on disk as I am just building out the scenic facilities now, and might remove the unmodelled areas just to be sure it will upload ok. The uploading is the bit I am concerned about. If it is under the current DLS limit as seems to be the case I'll be happy with that.
 
Actually the route GND file (which has all you route map and assets) that probably is so extremely large, that it can not possibly "Save To A CDP", and is most probably much, much, too gigantically large, in TB's file size, that the DLS will not be able to upload/download it, and receive it, for posting on the DLS.

Thanks muchly for taking the time to respond, but I do believe that TANE handles such things differently to the older versions of Trainz that your banner indicates you are using. The largest single file evident when I opened it for edit is a mere 165 MB (the mapfile.map file). TANE breaks the route up into many smaller GND files it seems, of which there are nearly 12000.

I'm not much of an IT guy, but I think that's how it works now.

If there's more to it than this maybe one of the gurus here can set us straight.
 
Thanks John. It was intended to be a big route and so it is. It won't get much bigger on disk as I am just building out the scenic facilities now, and might remove the unmodelled areas just to be sure it will upload ok. The uploading is the bit I am concerned about. If it is under the current DLS limit as seems to be the case I'll be happy with that.

That's good. The fact too that the route files themselves are segmented into tiny bits helps with the loading. In TS12 and below, as well as early T:ANE versions, these were huge files that would send Content Manager into a snit and then a tailspin. T:ANE would sit there forever chewing on the file and sometimes hang, but TS12 would faint and crash immediately to the desktop. I found this out the hard way when transferring content. There is still a limit, which I think is about 1 GB is about, and that is one huge route or CDP in general since everything is about twice that size!
 
Hi there.

I am looking for very long routes such as the Montana rail link so if you have any please give me the name to search for. Also in Surveyor I'd like to know what is the number limit of "grids" that can be put together in a single route. Also is there a limit on the number of objects/tracks that the game support in a single session?

tks.

Hello.

you may check for my map 'Brennerbahn - La Ferrovia del Brennero'
which is afaik the largest available European DEM map (6505 baseboards) right now.
Get the latest version here:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1gSHcqlWPTK8gz3xnDeaXU0DYTgZWUF8E
 
One of the best postings in this forum John !

As i am long enough with trainz, but - due to other hobbies like my modell railroad and my slotcar track - not always as active, i have tried to conquer jrfolcos mega routes - i did not make it. Unfortunately - even though, i would be tempted to make a session there again. Just cant make it. To big for just one trainzer.
 
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