Sea View Tropical Trolley

Climbing to Volcano Island (Sea View 3).

web•TrainSim was getting a bit frustrated with having to notch back to idle to keep within the speed limits on the Sea View route that he thought he'd power down Sally Prestgard's Tropical Trolley, funspeed.zip (5.5Mb, 25-Mar-03, from Train-sim.com) for a more leisurely run around the islands. Another goal was to make the Tropical Trolley compatible with the Raildriver desktop controller.

To this end, web•TrainSim took some of the code from the default Kiha 31 with its hydraulic drive converted to automatic gear changes rather than manual.

The other change was to lower the values for power and force.

You may know that MSTS does't do a good job of simulating hydraulic drives to such an extent that MaxPower, MaxForce and MaxContinuousForce are not even recognised. The only values that MSTS seems to recognise are those contained in the GearBoxMaxSpeedForGears and GearBoxMaxTractiveForceForGears parameters, particularly the latter which gives the maximum force available in each gear. web•TrainSim applied the fudge-factor until he found values that enabled him to climb Sea View's steep gradients at full throttle at a leisurely pace of about 15 mph.

If you want your own Tropical Trolley to have a bit more zip and zoom than what web•TrainSim's has, you only need to increase the force values in GearBoxMaxTractiveForceForGears by 200 or so.

Edit the Tropical Trolley's ENGine file, Spdstr-sv.eng, in WordPad, or your favourite Unicode text editor, changing the values shown below in red and pasting in the Kiha 31 EngineControllers code. If you've still got the zip download file, funspeed.zip, you've got a backup of the ENGine file, otherwise before you start, copy the original to a backup folder for safe keeping.

   Comment ( ** 17-Sep-03 : BMH : Downrate power. ** )
   Comment ( **                   Use Kiha 31 code. ** )
    ..............
   WheelRadius ( 9in )
    ..............
   BrakeEquipmentType( "EP_brake" )

   BrakeSystemType( "EP" )
    ..............
   MaxPower ( 85hp )
   MaxForce ( 1050N )
   MaxContinuousForce ( 800N )
   MaxVelocity ( 70mph )
   WheelRadius ( 9in )
    ..............
   Diesel EngineType ( "hydraulic" )

   GearBoxNumberOfGears( 2 )
   GearBoxDirectDriveGear( 2 )
   GearBoxMaxSpeedForGears( 20 50 )
   GearBoxMaxTractiveForceForGears( 1050N 800N )
   GearBoxOverspeedPercentageForFailure( 170 )
   GearBoxBackLoadForce( 450 )
   GearBoxCoastingForce( 200 )
   GearBoxUpGearProportion( 0.85 )
   GearBoxDownGearProportion( 0.35 )
   GearBoxOperation( automatic )
   GearBoxEngineBraking( direct_drive )
    ..............
   Comment ( ** Begin Kiha 31 replacement code ** )
   EngineControllers (
     Throttle ( 0 1 0.2 0 
       NumNotches ( 6 
         Notch ( 0         0 Dummy )
         Notch ( 0.2       0 Dummy )
         Notch ( 0.4       0 Dummy )
         Notch ( 0.6       0 Dummy )
         Notch ( 0.8       0 Dummy )
         Notch ( 1         0 Dummy )
        )
     )
           
   Brake_Train ( 0 1 0.0125 0.75
     NumNotches ( 4
       Notch ( 0    1 TrainBrakesControllerReleaseStart )
       Notch ( 0.35 1 TrainBrakesControllerEPApplyStart )
       Notch ( 0.85 1 TrainBrakesControllerEPHoldStart )
       Notch ( 0.9  0 TrainBrakesControllerEmergencyStart )
     )
   )
   Comment ( ** End Kiha 31 replacement code ** )
    ..............