AI Trains not Moving

kaw4014

Member
I'm trying to set up AI trains to go in and out of a station so I can screenshot them. What I want to do is say: "Drive to station Trackmark > Wait 2 mins > drive to staging Trackmark" (I have track marks in the stations and large staging yards outside the set). So I ran a test, I had a train (an NJT GP40PH-2B with 6 NJT Comet cars) go from a staging track to the station wait 30 sec and drive to staging. But it didn't move at all even though I waited for a while.

Things I tested:
On the same route I put down a straight track, a trackmark on one end and an engine on the other end and told it to drive to that track mark. It moved correctly in Driver mode.

I tested if some of the engines I was using wouldn't work with these commands so I made the setup i used above for each engine separately and ran it. Every engine moved correctly.

I added one car to each train (The Acela got an Acela car, the P42 got an Amfleet car and so on. Now only one of the six trains moved (The NJT GP40PH-2B with an NJT Comet car) the rest did nothing.


Extra info:
I'm using the NEC Wilmington - Philadelphia route, which is huge. I only want one station on one end of it, so I deleted 9/10 of the map's baseboards to improve performance.

At all times there were many trains placed at once. ~20-30 trains

When I go into the "Driver Setup" sometimes instructions I previously put in are gone.

When I go into the "Driver Setup" and select Drive to and then go to choose a trackmark, they are broken up into sections I didn't make (probably made by the map creator) that are also very unorganized. The 50 or so trackmarks I placed and named are scattered throughout these tabs
 
The most obvious causes, in the majority of cases, for the AI not moving are:-

(in order of me remembering them)

  1. a broken track segment (the join between two track segments has not been correctly made). You can usually test this by driving your train manually along the route and see if it derails.
  2. a missing junction switch. In Surveyor mode move along the track path to see if a track junction is missing its red/green junction direction arrows
  3. another train blocking the path (this may involve another AI train "seizing control" of track switches along the path while not actually physically blocking the path). That will also lock any approach signals for your train to stop.

In the above cases a message indicating the problem will be shown on the bottom left of the screen in Driver Mode. Make sure that the messages are turned on - click the white down arrow just above the driver icon so that it is pointing up. Even if there are no problems you will still get messages like "numLights = 2".
 
The most obvious causes, in the majority of cases, for the AI not moving are:-

(in order of me remembering them)

  1. a broken track segment (the join between two track segments has not been correctly made). You can usually test this by driving your train manually along the route and see if it derails.
  2. a missing junction switch. In Surveyor mode move along the track path to see if a track junction is missing its red/green junction direction arrows
  3. another train blocking the path (this may involve another AI train "seizing control" of track switches along the path while not actually physically blocking the path). That will also lock any approach signals for your train to stop.

In the above cases a message indicating the problem will be shown on the bottom left of the screen in Driver Mode. Make sure that the messages are turned on - click the white down arrow just above the driver icon so that it is pointing up. Even if there are no problems you will still get messages like "numLights = 2".

Thank you for the suggestion, but there is just three problems with that.

1: There are many many tracks that connect this station, so if there is one unconnected track, the AI would take an alternate route. I think the narrowest the tracks get is 4 tracks wide.
2: I made sure the AI's path was clear of trains.
3: I never got a message about the problem
 
Thank you for the suggestion, but there is just three problems with that.

1: There are many many tracks that connect this station, so if there is one unconnected track, the AI would take an alternate route. I think the narrowest the tracks get is 4 tracks wide.
2: I made sure the AI's path was clear of trains.
3: I never got a message about the problem

You have answered your own question. "Many many tracks" and the driver does not know which one to take as he has confused himself in the selection. You will need to help it with a path to the destination.
 
To troubleshoot, place a trackmark just past the first junction ahead of the train then issue a drive to TM command. Does it work?
If not, what is the driver message that appears?
If it does work, pause, switch back to surveyor, move the trackmark to a new location and switch back to driver and retry.
Through trial and error you'll find where things are going wrong.
Our upcoming Living Railroad update will help here with a new pathing display for drivers, and there will be an AI update later on to give more information about the AI options.
 
Our upcoming Living Railroad update will help here with a new pathing display for drivers, and there will be an AI update later on to give more information about the AI options.

Will this improved "AI" mean that machine learning is implemented or are you still using "AI" to mean the recursive programming routines written by the programmers?
 
Will this improved "AI" mean that machine learning is implemented or are you still using "AI" to mean the recursive programming routines written by the programmers?

I'm afraid it'll be like setting the EITs and other "easy to use assets" which require a degree in computer science with a doctorate in machine learning and certificates in recursive programming and logic.
 
I'm afraid it'll be like setting the EITs and other "easy to use assets" which require a degree in computer science with a doctorate in machine learning and certificates in recursive programming and logic.

Perhaps ChatGPT might be of assistance there? I was amused by a recent news report of a US lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare a submission in a court case. It turned out that the AI had included citations for cases that never existed and the names of companies that did not exist. The lawyer is now facing possible legal sanctions.

A lesson for us all.
 
Perhaps ChatGPT might be of assistance there? I was amused by a recent news report of a US lawyer who used ChatGPT to prepare a submission in a court case. It turned out that the AI had included citations for cases that never existed and the names of companies that did not exist. The lawyer is now facing possible legal sanctions.

A lesson for us all.

Maybe if it would help work through problems or provide concise tutorials on how to do things.

I saw that interesting article. Shame on the lawyer for doing that but then again, he's a lawyer... I can see ChatGPT and similar software completely replacing helpless desks now located overseas. I dealt with one of those, albeit an internal one for Oracle while I was working there. That truly was a helpless desk. The problem was our ticketing system was dispatched through that group. Most of the time, I had the problem resolved before I got the tickets in my email, and I would close them out immediately when they finally showed up.

Sometimes I had to wait in the queue for a representative just like everyone else even though I ran the support group for the Burlington, MA hub. One day the Oracle Beehive mail server was down during the day on the last day of the quarter just as sales and accounting were posting numbers for the month. The email server was used to transfer the closed orders to purchasing, and to finalize orders with customers. I went out for lunch and came back to a phone that was ringing so hard it was jumping up and down as if it was animated! I called the helpless desk and waited for a representative for over an hour. I finally got through only to be told the server was taking down for maintenance! The issue I had, was there was no notification was sent to us, and we had to face the brunt of the mess. I talked to my manager located in California about it and heads rolled. After that, whenever there was the slightest blip, an email was sent to the hub support groups so we could better support the users. The other outcome was no maintenance was to be performed during the month end/quarter end, or year-end last days unless it was an emergency. After I stood my ground on that, some more heads rolled. In the end, we still had to wait for more than an hour if we called.
 
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