Atomic Systems

Can you tell me if their is a way of changing the timings on activity?

As I have just created an activity for the Carlisle to Glasgow route using a pair on class 50`s which used to run over the line before electrification, but I am getting very poor timings when I use the timetable edit function. I have set the train to leave Carlisle at 1105 and stopping at Lockerbie and Motherwell enroute, the timetable editor gives me an arrival time in Glasgow for 1300, but I arrive at around 1230.

Is their a way of changing this to reflect actual timings?

(ahem) I suggest that you put queries of this nature in the Activities forum.

However, to answer, when you are in the Activity Editor and you choose to edit the player service, you will see a speed displayed (the default is 75mph). This drives the timetable schedule. If you change the speed displayed here, and then recalculate the activity, the arrival time in Glasgow will change. To make the scheduled arrival time in Glasgow sooner, increase the speed for the player service.

That 75 mentioned above isn't the speed but a percentage of the best speed between the two places. For example the 75% means that the train will be expected to achieve 75% of its maximum performance range. However, obviously lowering or raising this value will affect the timings too.

For example a 100mph average speed train will cover 100 miles in 1 hour if the setting is at 100%. If the same engine was set to 75% (default) it will do it in 1 hour and 15 minutes and so on.

For really tough schedules set the player setting to 100%. I find best results are obtained between 85% and 95% depending on the amount of traffic on the line and points etc.

Remember, the timings produced by the AE do not take these things into account, so a 3 minute wait at a red for oncoming traffic will not be a part of the AE generated timetable.

If you want to edit the timetable manually, you can do no better than download and use the great utility Activity Changer from http://www.train-sim.com file name: actchg11.zip (don't know why it's not available here...).

You can click on the timetable and manually enter the arrival and departure times.

You can Kev, but that's a real nightmare to get absolutely right. I was doing it the other day to try and change arrival and departure times for an activity and it gave me headaches (and I know quite a bit about MSTS now!). In the end I turned to Activity Changer and it was all done in a couple of minutes.

kevarc wrote:You can click on the timetable and manually enter the arrival and departure times.

Not quite true.

You can manually enter the arrival time.

If the arrival time is later than the current departure time the departure time is changed to match.

Other than that. you can't alter the departure time other than by manually editing the ACT file in notepad/wordpad

-Alan

I allways use the editing the ACT file for my activities. It's nice and easy to do, though can be time consuming if your activities involve stops at loads of stations.

To calculate the timings you need to use this formula.

To calculate the hour, 60 x 60 x (the hour). For example, 1900(7pm) would be 68400

To calculate the minutes, 60 x (the minutes). For example, 45 minutes past the hour would be 2700

Then add these 2 figures together to get the time you require, in this case it would be 71100 which would give a time of 1945.

I showed Horgy how to do the editing of the timetable before.

You can use the Activity Editor to do the time editing. It is a little bit of a long process to do it properly, but after you have once, it re-calculates the "performance" values itself. So a re-calculate always produces the correct timings.

took me about 3/4 of an hour to show him, but it takes about 15mins to do in reality.

You need a Pen and lots of paper Will write out the process at some point.

alan2 wrote:.... So a re-calculate always produces the correct timings.

Not exactly - you normally get odd seconds. The only way to get a proper timetable is to do it by hand - and copy/paste the timings to a different file in case of accidental recalculation!

-Alan

Ok i admit it might be about 3 second out. but that's the max value I've seen so far

Ahh... but Activity Changer allows you to enter arrival and departure times rounded to minuts or with whatever seconds you put in... All in a tabular format that's easy to see and do. For the above example, I'd type 17 in the hours box, 45 in the minutes box and leave the seconds box at 00.

Then work down the list as needed.

thanks for all the info, i will give the suggestions a try