Interchange Track

Hi All,

Just returning to Trainz after 9 years away.. got myself TRS 2019, and I am currently in the process of building my route. I remember there was an Interchange track (industry or portal type track) that would remove cars from the route and respawn a cut of cars. I am away from my computer, but was looking on the download station and couldn't find it.

Is it still available? Is there anything similar?

Also, is there any good car control systems/operations assets or systems out now? I now about CMTM and car tracker (I think they work with 19), just wondering about anything else.

Thanks,

Beans

What you are looking for is Lars Interchange LT kuid2:30671:23391:1. The site that had it is no longer operating though.
Cheers,
Mike

Anything similar available? I am not sure if portals can do similar or if they only spawn preprogrammed trains.

Portals can consume trains as well as spawn them, but as you said they need to be preprogrammed but that's easy enough to do.

I still have a copy of the Lars interchange LT, but alas it does not work any more. Changes to trainz scripting has killed it. In fact I have an unreleased copy of Lars' unreleased PL Interchange. I only have a copy because I was beta testing for him. That version is even better than the LT and has more randomizing features. Neither of them work any more though.

I have two strategies to kinda achieve the same thing. Again this isn't as random as the interchange was.

1)
I make a bunch of random consists that I want to use on the layout and save them in the trains consist tab in surveyor.
Then while playing the session I park a consist on my "interchange" track and then "edit trains" on the tools menu.
I delete the outgoing consist and then place a randomly selected consist I saved earlier on the "interchange" track.
Then when a driver couples with it I use the "instant load random" rule to randomly load the consist.
The consist will then have to be broken up and classified based on the random load.

2)
Same as the first create your consists and save them. Then create a portal on the route to generate consist however often you want.
Add one of your saved consists to be generated and a driver. The first driver command to setup is the "instant load random" command.
Then add a command to drive the train to a track-mark on your inbound track.
Now here is where you can add some randomness to this.
Add two more consists for the portal to generate.
Assign just one locomotive to the consist and setup a driver command for the driver to drive right back into the portal it was generated from.
When operating the session the portal will pick one of the three consists to generate but two out of three times nothing will go into your layout. Those drivers will just disappear after a couple of seconds.
The result is that you wont know when your valid consists will arrive. Sometimes they come pretty fast. Sometimes you have dry spells where there is nothing arriving that you need.

Repeat this process until you have all your saved valid consist randomly generated and two dummy consists for each valid one. After adding 4 valid consists and 8 dummies you will have a very random traffic generator.
There are all kinds of variation you can do based on this strategy and it does randomize things pretty nice. It takes a bit to setup but creates lots of operating interest.

Hal

I remember using that as well many years ago. It's too bad that it can't be updated to work with the modern Trainz versions. What I do is run run-through consists between to destinations The AI drives between two towns and when I want to interchange freight, I intervene with one of them and have the AI stop in a yard. Once stopped, I switch in and out the freight I want to send along and let the AI continue on its schedule. I've even gone as far as to, in some cases, to send the AI to an engine house for maintenance while I switch out the freight, and then have the driver couple on to the modified consist to complete its schedule.