Restricting Stock to certain tracks Options

[Frascati]

Hi

Is there a way of restricting stock to appear only on certain tracks. I have some military stock which I wish to appear only on military sidings. By putting this stock on Industry tracks, Ive got it partly doing what I want. But it also appears in the random mix of stock that is used to fill the route.

Secondly is there way to influence the selection of stock. Say have the local operators stock predominate but have foreign stock occasionaly turn up. It seems that at the moment all boxcars (say) are put into a pool and treated equally so that if you had say 5 SP boxcars and 20 foreign, the SP cars would only appear 20% of the time.

Thanks

[nbeveridge]

Peter,

Thanks for writing another response full of thought provoking ideas.

I have noticed that the "seed" car placed on an industry track in the template has a great influence as to what cars are placed on that track via the "fill world" function.  But I had never thought to place more than one car there to try to influence it even further.  How exactly this works in AG I don't know, but I will discuss it with Steve.

This idea will help with template development, and I will stash it in my bag of tricks for use in future templates and in modification of existing templates.

How easily this can be done is dependent in part on how many cars are in the template.  For instance, if I have only one NYC box car, I cannot use it for both a BX and for a BNYC.  Common practice is to create the template using as few downloads as possible, maximizing use of default equipment.  If a route has no default equipment, then this pretty much restricts the template to the 23 basic car types in the MSTS default set.  That leaves little room for manipulating car types in the way you have described.  Even when "forced" into using a lot of downloads, as with the NS templates that I did, the template really does not have a large variety of most car types.  The NS set has 52 cars, I believe, of which 23 are the MSTS default set and 16 more are from a nice coal car download.  That leaves only 13 of all other cars!

But for the end user, like yourself, who is savvy about modifying the templates and who has a large amount of rolling stock, this trick may very well solve some of the issues at hand.

As I said, I will discuss this with Steve to see if we may have a way to accomplish the "home road" world fill that you desire.  This may also lead to some other ideas of how to influence car placement.

Once again you have stimulated my thinking.  As a result, as I said before, I see more ways to make better, more realistic templates, which will result in better, more realistic activities, which will benefit the entire MSTS community!