Milwaukee Road Idaho Division (known as the GAP), Oncoming template Options

[dgionet]

Hello to all,

Following the release of the Milwaukee's Idaho Division, known as the GAP, I have started to take a look at it to build a template. The current route will have some challenges and interesting twists during construction of the templates. One of the interesting features of the oncoming template is the change of Motive Power the player will proceed in doing from Electric to Diesel at both Avery and Othello locations. This has been inspired with the release and testing of the PRR-Eastern template in which case Pete has provided some templates where the run switched from electric to diesel and vice-versa.

The player will have the choice of two sets of diesel engines to hook up to, six each to totalize 9500 hp, a mix of F-Units, GP7's sd7's and sd10's. Oh yes, I almost forgot; the main download will be the BLW Milwaukee Freight set. The electric Boxcabs and Little Joes ( From TrainSim) will be part of switching of motive power.

A major challenge found concerns the length of the sidings at Avery. They are very short and couldn't host a reasonably long consist if the template is being built the usual way. The longest siding along the mainline is no longer than eight cars.I found a way to overcome the sidings length issue in Avery, generated a SLG-Generated activity and successfully reached Avery with a reasonable number of cars. The second set of images will help you understand how this has been done.Inspiration for this one came from something similar done while building the DRGW Green River Template.

In Avery the second "Avery Siding" is about four cars in length ( based on a 18meter car average). In Malden, I have set up an activity to pickup cars on Malden Yard 2 siding. AG set the maximum to four, corresponding to the Avery siding limit. Once done the player simply has to hook up to a loose consist (about 45 cars long along the Malden siding, caboose is included) and proceed to Avery with it.

Here is the important part: as long as the four designated cars come inside the Avery Siding limits, whatever the location of these four cars within the consist, AG will end successfully the act. Here are the first set of images regarding change of motive power from Electric to diesel. The first five at Avery and the remaining four at Othello.



















The other images on the next post

[Harlank]

Denis

thank you for another great template
Route Riter tells me there are a couple of .srv files missing










Harlan Sandberg

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[dgionet]

Hi Harlank,

Following your comments, I have checked the issue and found the problem and have made corrections.

During construction of the templates, WB and EB traffic patterns are used by at least two templates, the Mainline (EB & WB) and locals (EBLOCALS & WBLOCALS) templates.

During testing of the LOCALS templates, some corrections to the traffic pattern were done and correction to the LOCALS templates were saved accordingly. Corrections of the traffic pattern using the LOCALS would also affect the mainline templates, using the MILWGAPWB.trf andMILWGAPEB.trf files. At this level, AG should create successfully the acts with the updated traffic pattern.

However, the unchanged WB and EB mainline template ACT files still contained references to traffic that no longer exists. This is why Route Riter has detected them, despite the fact that AG can still generate successfully the acts, since they use the traffic files as mentioned above as source files for traffic.

I have reopened both the mainline EB and WB and saved them again, correcting the traffic pattern to those corrected on the LOCALS templates.

Included here are both corrected files in a zip file. Simply unzip them and overwrite the previous ACT files in the ACTIVITIES folder.

I will write Steve later to update the template package.

Thanks Harland for finding the issue.

Attached File(s)

 GAPtemplateupdate.zip ( 12.39K ) Number of downloads: 22