web•TrainSim's LGV Med activities

This page documents web•TrainSim's preparation for building some activities for LGV Med 2. He'd started with a couple of activities on LGV Med 1.1 and decided to start again by re-organising some documentation.

Preparation begins with writing up paths on small cards. Before these cards can be completed, platform arrivals/destinations at Marseille need to be decided on. Similarly for other stations but they don't have as many options.

Time has to be spent following tracks to and fro at Marseille in the Activity Editor to decide where it's possible to run trains. Two points to bear in mind are that trains run on the left on the LGV Med and that it's best to avoid path crosses as much as possible because of the limitations of the AI controller/dispatcher.

For Marseille, a decision was made that, in general, the range of platforms would be roughly divided in half - one half for departures, the other half for arrivals.

So for TGV services, platforms M, L, K and J are for departures and platforms I, H, G and F are for arrivals (you'll see why the order of platforms is written this way when you look at the lines at Marseille St. Charles in the Activity Editor).

Platforms N, O and P are assigned to services to/from La Joliette and L'Estaque.

Once platforms have been allocated, paths can be built, knowing that there won't be any AI trains in the same place at the same time in services that will use these paths. When building up passenger traffic in an activity in the Traffic pattern editor, it's far easier inserting services (which are simply containers for a train to take a particular path) in the knowledge that paths have been clearly defined at the outset.

The only other constraint is the placement of loose consists - a record needs to be kept of where they are used, again, to avoid problems with two trains being in the same place at the same time. web•TrainSim would like to see some alternative to loose consists, namely, the option to make an AI train visible before it departs or leave it visible after it arrives at its destination.

Marseille platform use

Long platforms (for TGV trainsets) are:

F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M

Short platforms are:

A | B | C | D | E | N | O | P

Paths

All path names are preceded by wDTS-, so for example wDTS-LJ-MS-lcl.

Services (traffic)

All service names are preceded with wDTS- and suffixed with -trf (traffic) or -frgt (freight or train movement) or -std (standard TGV service) or -dir (direct TGV service, no stops). For example, wDTS-MS-AX-std-trf.