Have you had trouble with AI's cutting your train at the wrong coupler?

I just noticed last night that the wrong freight cars were being delivered to the wrong customers in my RR district. Later going back into Surveyor and rechecking the Route, I noticed that a consist of two boxcars on one siding were facing the wrong direction. That is they were facing toward the bumper instead of toward the junction of the siding. The Trains/Consist tab has a tool to alter the direction facing of a consist as indicated by red/green overlay arrows. All the other cars on all the other district freight customer sidings are oriented such that the consists face away from the bumpers. Each and every one of my eight district rail-freight customers, except for Thompson Sawmill, has freight consists of only the same car types on a given siding varying in number from 2 or more cars. Some customers have two sidings with consists of a different car type on each. No one customer has just a single lone car on any siding. Thompson Sawmill has two freight sidings with a consist of all logging cars on one and another consist of five center-beam lumber cars followed by five woodchips gondolas on the other.

Some uncoupling commands count couplers back from front of the train to rear while others count from rear to front. I have a hunch that if two coupled cars in a consist are oriented in a direction opposite from all the rest, there may be an error in the software's counting couplers so the train might be cut in an incorrect location. It seems as having the two boxcars in the middle of the train flip-flipped in direction caused the larger consist in the yard to be cut back one car too many. Railroad Simulator 2012 may have not counted the coupler in between the two boxcars that were facing the wrong way. Eventually cars that are picked up at customer sidings will be delivered back to the customers. The sequence of assembling these local freight trains is crucial. My schedule uncoupling commands only count couplers from one end of the train or the other and they do not identify freight cars by specific types or road numbers unlike human train crews with switch list cards. My train in the yard should have been cut between a set of woodchips gondolas and a set of five cattle cars. It appears as my train was cut between two cattle cars immediately following the set of gondolas. One cattle car was delivered to Thompson Sawmill along with all the other cars that were supposed to be delivered there. Then another cattle car was delivered to Norton concrete at its square hopper siding along with three hoppers instead of all four. Then a hopper car was delivered to Norton's drum hopper car siding along with the lone square hopper and the mis-delivery mess continues along in this fashion. After correcting the orientation of the two boxcars at American Freight's siding, I am re-running Driver and my district freight customer pickup and delivery schedules to verify if the delivery error is corrected. All five of the cattle cars should be delivered to the siding of Campbell XX Ranch's feedlot and nowhere else.

When a train couples in a siding, the front of the consist is the last car and uncouple from counts back from the last car, not the engine. The same applies when you reverse into a siding, the last car is the lead car. It is the direction of travel that determines which is the lead car and the car which becomes 0 when counting back. If you reverse into a siding, use the change direction command before the uncouple command. This will make the engine the lead car. The minimap will show you which end of the consist the driver is at.

I believe I just found out the reason for the train's being cut at the wrong car. On my latest test run, I noticed Davidson Intermodal had a consist of 6 cars on its siding, not 5, as I had originally intended. This would explain why my district pickup freight train was cut one car too many back toward the rear. The uncouple command did count cars correctly. It counted that one extra car that should have not been there in the first place! I've since corrected the Davidson siding car count and now I'm retesting the pickup and delivery schedules in Driver. I think my troubles are now over. I need to learn how to count!

I don't think I can use the change direction command on a schedule anyway. The driver seems to do this automatically.

On my layout scenario, one scheduled train only picks up cars from RR district customers while another only delivers the cars back. Most American railroads probably have both pickups and deliveries during the same run over a given jurisdiction of the railroad. For Trainz purposes, not mixing pickups and deliveries over the same schedule simplifies things for repetitive executions of the schedules. Real-world-type switch lists are much more complex than I care to venture into. On my layout, a train from an imaginary RR division yard comes to my visible Prestonville yard to pickup the consist of customer freight cars picked up locally and takes it to a hidden staging area siding for holding until I Copy Commands to have the "division" train swap out my local yard cars again. This division train also leaves behind another consist of similar cars at the Prestonville yard to be delivered back to local customers. I might pickup 5 Illinois Grain Corporation hoppers from Stover Feed Mill and send them back 5 CN National hoppers. American Freight, a warehouse terminal that moves freight between boxcar and trailer truck, may have two Galveston Wharves double door boxcars at it's loading dock and those get traded out with two shorter single door Virginian boxcars from time to time. Other customers might just get traded with cars of the same type with the same markings or the same car types with different liveries. Customers always get back the same number of cars they shipped out prior for Route/Session building simplicity.

The visiting division train, connecting the local district with a higher level of railroad networking, continually swaps out one set of freight cars for another similar consist at the local yard to be shuttled back and forth between local industries by local Prestonville district locomotives, GP9 road switchers. The division train has the mighty mainline locomotives, SD40T-2's.

Perpetually, cars are traded off between the imaginary division yard and the yard serving my local customers continuously. It's an ongoing cycle of picking up local cars, trading them off with division, a higher echelon, a distribution point, and delivering cars back to locals. The pretended division yard unloads all my outgoing cars and the only loaded cars it returns to my district yard are logging cars since the Thompson Sawmill only receives logs and converts them to lumber and woodchips to be sent out. The logging cars are always right behind the division yard locomotives. The driver can uncouple the remainder of the train behind the logging cars only so as to load the logging cars with the Instant Load command and then recouple with rest of the train which is empty for return to the district yard.

Hi

I don't think I can use the change direction command on a schedule anyway. The driver seems to do this automatically.

Click to expand...

Oh but you can. I use this all the time because of the reason that stagecoach mentions. Why not give it a try to prove it to yourself.

Regards

Brian

Kennilworth said:

Hi


Oh but you can. I use this all the time because of the reason that stagecoach mentions. Why not give it a try to prove it to yourself.

Regards

Brian

Click to expand...

I will keep it in mind for the future in case I ever have to create any more driving schedules involving cutting and coupling. Whenever I'm not sure if the software is counting from the front or back of the train, the only way I have found out which number to assign to a coupler count for cutting a train is through test runs and observation: trial and error. I have been using the Coupler Mode (displays coupler overlays) and Pause (the game) to indicate what is happening with the couplers during test runs.