Station not recognised

[alanturk]

I have been developing a new activity for my fantasy route, involving a certain amount of shunting before my train gets going. The locomotive has to pass through a station twice (once forward, then in reverse) before turning on a triangular track section and finally reversing back into the station with its coaches. I want it to stop there for loading before pulling away forward on its journey elsewhere. I can drive it successfully through all these moves, but the Next Station display fails to recognise it, so the software eventually complains of a missed station (all others are recognised OK). In the Activity Editor, all three passes show up, and I have checked only the third one, which I hoped do do the trick, but it doesn't! A clue I suppose might be that the distance shown to the next station changes almost at random between passes, though the distance to the first station that is actually recognised finally shows up correctly. So I guess I'm missing something, but what? Can anyone help, please?

[SDtrains]

Hi there,

I'm not sure what is causing this problem, but it does cross the boundaries of my own developed sense of what MSTS can handle and where it gives up trying to understand what you want to make it do. MSTS does not like continuous loops, this we know, but also it seems that it does not like having to drive back over paths already driven over more than once. You can usually get an engine to reverse onto stock and pull away again, and many times in the same activity at different points, but getting a loco to do what you are describing will be testing on the signalling logic and I rather suspect that this is what is at the root of the problem.

Hope this is of help,

Regards

[cambrian06]

I believe that the problem is that for a station to appear in the next station display the player path has to continue beyond the furthest station marker point, if the path has a reversing point between the station marker points the station isn't recognised. The same problem occurs trying to reverse trains at terminus stations.
Regards,
Andy.

[alanturk]

Thanks for both of those. I agree I am pushing MSTS a bit and may be pushing too hard, but I don't want to have a major rethink of the activity, so I'll press on for a while yet.

The reverse point in question is just beyond the platform marker, so from what you say it should work, but I have moved it a little further away to see if it makes any difference. I'm struggling with a few other problems at present, so it may be a while before I can report back, but I will definitely do so in due course.

Thanks again.

Alan.