L'Estaque to Marseille on LGV Med

This activity is a commuter run from L'Estaque to Marseille and another run from Marseille to L'Estaque. Both are somewhat similar to Wolfgang Pletz's Commuter Interlude activities in his TGV Pack, TGVPack.zip (V1.1, 16-Sep-02) from the LGV Med site.

In the first place, compared to a route such as Modern England, the LGV Med route is somewhat easier to work with in the Activity Editor. One reason is there is less choice of different service paths - for example, Marseille-Nimes, Nime-Marseille, Marseille-L'Estaque, Marseille-La Joliette, just about constitute all possible paths. Most of these are included with the installation of the route as they make up the learning activities that Luc Web gives us to get started.

Notwithstanding what's already available, web•TrainSim set about designing paths for himself, bearing in mind he wanted to provide more traffic for a given activity.

Marseille to L'Estaque is quite a short trip so when it comes to testing in MSTS itself only about fifteen minutes need to be set aside (in comparison, the King's Cross to Manchester high-speed activity actually works out to be one and half hours). As always, what the Play function does in the AE and what actually happens with a human driver can lead to different outcomes!

Note: this activity has been re-designed for LGV Med V2.0. There is also an activity Marseille - L'Estaque and return - see the downloads page.

A couple of decisions

web•TrainSim decided that local commuter services would begin/end at Marseille Platforms O and N for L'Estaque and Marseille Platform P for La Joliette services. For such a service entering Marseille, the train cuts across the paths of the TGV platforms so that adds a bit of uncertainty to what happens to an arriving or departing TGV trainset.

At L'Estaque, arrival of a driver train is to Platform 2 with the thought that web•TrainSim might later (don't hold your breath, Ed) create a single activity for a Marseille-L'Estaque-Marseille trip, using one of the suburban sets with a rear cab view (e.g., the Z5600).

All these paths were thought about first and ideas put to those little white cards, using meaningful two-letter abbreviations for station and siding names and a number or letter to designate the departing and arrival platforms/sidings.

web•TrainSim also remembered to prefix all activity names, path names and services with wDTS- for easy identification (of who to blame when things don't work out, Ed).

Observations

You would have observed that our MI79 train hasn't stopped long at St. Barthelemy before that following TGV pulls up at the station on the main line. That can happen on the LGV Med because blocks or sections are much smaller than on other routes, such as Modern England. The LGV Med route is blocked into 1.5 km sections and the controller at Marseille can therefore schedule more trains so that the route can safely cope with a higher-frequency timetable.