Strange goings-on

Something very odd happened recently. One of my drivers apparently hopped into a different train. If you look carefully at the attached screenshot, she is apparently driving to Banjo Park as intended - it says this in the drivers inset on the left, and although it doesn't say so, that is also what the image at the bottom of the screen represents, but if you look at the (bottom left) representation of the track, she is in fact driving to a completely different station which is on a separate, unconnected track. Took me a while to realise that she had somehow jumped into that train, while the train she should have been on has been left driverless.
To start with, I thought there might have been a driver swap, until one of my other trains was about to hit the rear of the one she had left driverless. The driver of the train she appropriated has apparently gone home!

Russian, Chinese or North Korean hackers at work?

Yup, I knew it! The AI are real and not virtual drivers. In real life they go home when we shutdown Trainz for the night, have families and come back to work the next day. These drivers are also wildly outspoken and are unionized which means that they will go on strike at a moment's notice. The AI drivers, not naming any one in particular, will also choose to do their own thing after their excessively long lunches.

In reality, I have no idea why this will occur unless it was a miss assignment by you. In other words, self-inflicted. Been there and one that and I went crazy figuring out why an AI driver was taking the wrong branch and then backing up. It wasn't until I went for a ride with the suspect driver that I realized what I did. Did I apologize? Of course not!

This is so funny to listen to I Love It I have a driver that's looking for a portal that doesn't exist it did exist before I merge the routes so I think what I'm going to have to do is delete all my portals and redo them something is definitely amiss because different drivers keep looking for the same portal the portal number three....

blueodessey said:

This is so funny to listen to I Love It I have a driver that's looking for a portal that doesn't exist it did exist before I merge the routes so I think what I'm going to have to do is delete all my portals and redo them something is definitely amiss because different drivers keep looking for the same portal the portal number three.... 

Click to expand...

I've had that happen too way too often and wondered why they were doing screwy things. What's worse is when there are similarly named portals, track marks and industries. When troubleshooting, we spend time looking for the problem only to find that everything looks fine. We spend sometimes hours looking and looking and then just as we give up, we find that the name was very similar but different.

So true! I have had wilful drivers who regularly did their own thing, completely disrupting my carefully scripted rail system. However, this was the first time I've had a driver get off one train and ride another.

I had a route/session developed in early version TRS19, and in later TRS19+ and TRS22+ versions, the session went bonkers. A lot of unexplained driver behavior. I did a compact route (obviously backup first) that seemed to help. But when I started seeing the driver setup in edit session not match the reality of what the drivers are doing, I decided that the session was corrupted. I redid the session from scratch and have not had a problem since (except for user error). Not fun but doing it allows you to rethink what the session should do, so it might be beneficial.

Okay...

The drivers can do weird things. I had this happen last night.

I have a route with two portals on the ends of a short stretch, maybe 3-miles long max. Freight trains traverse between the two portals with no stops and to keep them on track, I put a couple of track marks in between so they don't take a couple of sidings. These drivers have no issues with this, and they'll do this until I quit running. The passenger trains do a similar route except they stop at two intermediate stations. For the most part, they're all doing the same thing, except for one driver who decides it's time to go exploring and ended up miles away down along the waterfront and got stuck because the curves are too tight!

I checked this driver's commands in Driver Setup in the session and they were fine which had me puzzled and gave up fix a quirky junction in my yard area. While in Surveyor, I checked the portals. The same drivers appeared in the portals with their commands just the same. I checked their commands, and all were fine except for the one that was messing up.

For some reason, way, way back, I had setup the driver with the wrong command, by sending down the wrong track and this got saved to the portal. The driver was actually trying his best to find the correct platform but had no way to get to it and was exploring all over the route.

To solve the problem, I deleted this driver from the portal in Surveyor and saved. I then went into Driver setup and replaced him again with his few commands. Problem solved.

So, with that said I think this is the issue that caused the problem in the first place. There are actually two drivers with the same name assigned to the same train. One driver was placed while editing the route in Surveyor and the other was placed while editing in the Session editor. Each instance of the driver has two separate sets of commands, therefore, follows the set they were assigned. In the end, unfortunately, our drivers don't go home to their families, and are in fact only computer scripted characters following what they're told to do.