King's Cross to Manchester

This activity centres around you getting your high-speed Pendolino service from King's Cross to Manchester in the morning rush. A similar service to yours has departed fifteen minutes earlier in front of you. There are also high-speed Pendolino services coming from Manchester, as well as local electric suburban services carrying passengers between regional stations.

Apart from the Virgin Pendolino Class 390 trainset, all other rolling stock is Australian-liveried: Countrylink Endeavour, CityRail S-Set electric suburban trainsets, NQOX flat wagons, S302, V/Line BS passenger cars and V/Line wheat wagons.

Give ourselves options

Enough has been said about planning paths, firstly on paper, secondly in the Path editor in AE - see What happens when... in the page which introduces the Activity Editor. Spending the extra time on learning the route pays off. You have to know answers to questions such as:

• which track do you need to be on to pick up passengers at platform X?
• where do you cross from the fast to slow track to get to platform X?
• are the points you're going to use automatic, or are they manual and a potential problem for the controller?
• are there passing loops you can use on a single line? will these work as expected?
• if this path was used by the drivable train in an activity, would it be satisfactory and fit in with other traffic?

Having methodically set up traffic paths, ones which can be used for traffic or as drivable in other activities, much of the hard work is done.

In fact, what we're setting up is a schedule of train traffic for a particular section of a route. In the context of this King's Cross-Manchester activity, we're working towards setting up a traffic schedule for about two hours in the morning for the King's Cross-Manchester section of the Modern England route.

So out of this King's Cross-Manchester activity, others follow - these come to mind:

• you're driving the freight train from Oxford Siding to Agricultural Yard past Tyne on the Manchester-Cardiff branch, or
• you're in charge of the high-speed Manchester-King's Cross Pendolino service, or
• you have the job of taking S302 and the V/Line passenger cars Manchester-King's Cross, or
• you've been rostered on one of the local electric suburban S-sets.

Manchester - King's Cross

web•TrainSim is currently designing this activity as the return trip in charge of the Pendolino service. Most of the traffic is the same as that in the King's Cross - Manchester activity, but, of course in this case, from a different perspective. Here are some thoughts.

All the paths that traffic need to/from Manchester are already created - only one or two extra were needed.

Whenever a new path needs creating, web•TrainSim has decided that the best method is to exit the current work on creating the activity and begin a new Junk activity with a Junk player service. This technique means there are not other paths cluttering the display in the AE and you're able to focus on this one job. The technique may not be necessary in routes that aren't too complicated, but in routes such as Modern England and North East Corridor, where there are many different possible paths because of mulit-tracks, the job is much easier.

AE vs MSTS

At the time of writing, web•TrainSim is still not happy with the way the activity is panning out in MSTS. It looks ok in Play mode in the Activity Editor, but it's not so good in reality.

So it's back to the drawing board to adjust some of the departure times of the traffic from Manchester in AE and then a reality check will be carried out in MSTS.

web•TrainSim seems to have made a small change somewhere to a piece of traffic and this has resulted in fewer yellows and reds for his Pendolino. Consequently, he arrived at Manchester earlier than he had been. Maybe he was driving more conservatively. Some variability is not a bad thing, however.

Rolling stock for both activities

From Train-sim.com:

• S302 loco by Christine Sweetnam: sclass25.zip
• NSW CityRail S-Set suburban electric trainset: ssetce12.zip
• NSW Countrylink Endeavour trainset: auendvr.zip
• NSW Countrylink Explorer trainset: explorer.zip
• V/Line VHGY wheat wagons: vhgy.zip

From Australian Addons for MSTS:

• Ten flat wagons with containers: AunswNQOX_Setup.exe
• NSW class 81 locos: Aunsw81_Setup.exe
• V/Line BS carriages: AU_vicBS_setup.exe

From Victorian Rail MSTS (James Brooks):

• VR B-class locos B60 and B74 (both VR blue & gold): Au_b_loco.exe
• VR B-class locos B72 (VR blue & gold) and B83 (V/Line orange): Au_b_modern.exe
• VR GY yellow 4-wheel wagon: Au_gy3626.exe
• VR J cememt hopper wagon: Au_j.exe
• VR VLX louvred bogie wagon: Au_vlx.exe