How AG handles freight cars Options

[Chessiefan93]

Hi,

I have had this program for awhile but never found the time to fiddle with it much.  I looked at several of the video tutorials about placing cars on a template and it left me with some questions.  Correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.  It looks like when creating a template you place one freight car on a siding in-between  the markers and then AG calculates how long the siding is and looks at that car and can put however many of that type of car that will fit on that siding. 

My question is how does it handle car length?  If I put a boxcar that is 40 ft long on a template siding is AG going to only use 40 ft boxcars on the siding or is it going to use any length boxcar?  If it uses any boxcar (some are pretty long) will it calculate length of consist to fit on the siding or is it using a certain number of cars that it thinks will fit on the siding?  I ask this because it looks like it counts a number of cars that will fit and you can adjust that number in the excel spread sheet....I am guessing that it must be using the one car that you put on the siding in the template to calculate number of cars.  If that is true then it could only use 40 foot boxcars if the one car you used is 40 ft.   Otherwise you would run out of space if it used say a 60 footer.

Also it looks like you can only use only one type of car per siding or set it for all car types.  Is there a way to only use two car types on a siding if you wanted to?

 

Thanks,

Harold

[sgdavis]

Hi,

I have had this program for awhile but never found the time to fiddle with it much.  I looked at several of the video tutorials about placing cars on a template and it left me with some questions.  Correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.  It looks like when creating a template you place one freight car on a siding in-between  the markers and then AG calculates how long the siding is and looks at that car and can put however many of that type of car that will fit on that siding. 

That's pretty much correct, except the car needs to be placed at one or the other end of the siding, or AG might place the full siding length worth of cars behind that car and it would overlap onto the main or past the end of the siding.  For some routes/spurs you don't really want to use the whole spur, only part of it may be close to the industry you want to serve.

My question is how does it handle car length?  If I put a boxcar that is 40 ft long on a template siding is AG going to only use 40 ft boxcars on the siding or is it going to use any length boxcar?  If it uses any boxcar (some are pretty long) will it calculate length of consist to fit on the siding or is it using a certain number of cars that it thinks will fit on the siding?  I ask this because it looks like it counts a number of cars that will fit and you can adjust that number in the excel spread sheet....I am guessing that it must be using the one car that you put on the siding in the template to calculate number of cars.  If that is true then it could only use 40 foot boxcars if the one car you used is 40 ft.   Otherwise you would run out of space if it used say a 60 footer.

The calculation is only a starting point.  It is based on a typical car length but template designers can change that.  So if you anticipate using 60' cars you'd either change the typical car length to 60' or if this wasn't a global value just call for fewer cars on the spur.  While what you say makes a lot of sense, in actual practice we've very rarely seen issues with this.  Usually there is a lot more physical room on a given track than is needed.  Still it's up to the template designer, who will know the era and what the typical car length will be on a spur (i.e. long lumber beam cars) to override the suggested length AG calculates. 

AG calculates the actual length of each siding in meters and stores that in the SWLTDB file it creates.  So as the template designer you can use/assume different length cars for different types of sidings, also.

Also if the siding doesn't start at the marker so there will only be room for a lesser number of cars, you need to account for that.  I cover this in my template design video tutorial, showing how when a car is placed part way up a siding, you need to deduct for the space in the siding that will never be used by the program.  Again though a lot of this is theoretical:  I'm pretty lazy, I generally just use the length that AG comes up with and it usually works.  If not I'd edit the length before distributing the template -- but I've never actually had to do that.

Also it looks like you can only use only one type of car per siding or set it for all car types.  Is there a way to only use two car types on a siding if you wanted to?

Earlier I would have said "No", only one type per siding.  But no longer!  I announced on this forum some time ago, AG version 4.  One of the (many) additional features of this update (which is free to all current users) is it will allow you to specify any number of car types to be picked up, and set out, on any spurs.  You simply separate the type codes by hyphens (-).  So for example let's say this was a multi-use spur at a small metal fabricator.  You might accept gondola cars with scrap metal, coil steel loads, and perhaps loaded covered hoppers, and ship out empty gons, empty coil cars and empty covered hoppers (if you bother to differentiate -- I often don't since you can't see if the hoppers are loaded in MSTS.  It's all a matter of how detailed YOU as the template designer want to be!).  And maybe take empty box cars and ship out loads of the finished product.

An example of how this would be set up (you can name your types however you want, the codes I'm using are just my personal preference) --

CARTYPEWANTED: GSCP-STL-CVH-BXMT

CARTYPESHIPPED: GMT-STLMT-CVHMT-BX

I have just today COMPLETED VERSION 4 and am in the process of testing it.  After some of my beta testers have a chance to check it out I will be posting it, hopefully in less than 10 days, maybe even sooner.

Also a great way to get a feel for how this works, before you go to all the trouble of creating your own templates (and maybe getting frustrated), is to try some of the templates already posted on the "Templates" page of this site.  Especially anything written for AG3 or later.  That way you can get a feel for how activities are generated, how the templates work, and what you like (and don't like) about the templates others have created.  You can "reverse engineer" other folks' templates, including mine, simply by opening up the SWLTDB and SWLACT files that come with all the templates.  It might help to take a peak at the .act file using the MSTS Activity Editor also.

I hope this helped.

Thanks,

Steve

sgdavis2007-7-14 17:47:2