Controlling dynamic brakes in undriven engines

[chrisell]

It's been two years since I tried to wrap my head around this topic but it's reared it's ugly head again. I still cannot for the life of me figure out how to get dynamic brakes to work in anything other than the engine I'm in.
For example, on my Stadler GTW - the engine is in the engine car in the middle of the train, with driving wagons at both ends. For a start, Railworks doesn't properly support driving wagons so the hack for that is to make the driving wagons engines but make their bogies unpowered. So that allows fully working cabs etc.
But when it comes to the dynamic brake, it only ever applies to the wagon I'm driving - the fake engine in this case. There is no dynamic braking from the engine car in the middle of the train, or the rear driving trailer (the other fake engine).
This means of course as soon as I join two GTW sets together, the dynamic brake is almost useless because I've now doubled the weight of the train but still only have one wagon using dynamic brakes.

It's not just the GTW either. The IRM has the same problem - it has engines at either end of the train (and one in the middle sometimes), and only the one I'm actually in ever uses the dynamic brake.

Has anyone ever figured this out? It seems to work for the DTG engines - you can throw an SD40 in the middle of the rake somewhere and it seems to use dynamic brakes. But I can't figure out how they're doing it. I've tried everything from forcing values back down the train sending messages in my scripts, to "apply to consist" controllers - nothing seems to work. I even wrote a script to intercept the TrainBrakeControl and force that into DynamicBrake for the rear engines, but even that doesn't work because it seems TrainBrakeControl is also only 'active' in the cab you're driving - the air brakes on the rest of the train are all controlled from that cab, and the other controls don't do anything in the trailing wagons.

Any ideas would be appreciated ... it's bloody frustrating that something as simple as this doesn't work. (along with the 10,000 other bugs I have to script around).

[ChrisBarnes]

I know next to nothing about how dynamic brakes work in TS, as I've never needed to use them myself, and given what you've already tried, I'm not sure what else to suggest. However, two questions pop to mind:

1) Are you absolutely sure that the DTG non-player locos are definitely using their dynamic brakes? I guess you could check by listening to the dynamic braking whirring, or check the dynamic control value in the Control State Dialog, now that it supports all vehicles in the consist.

2) Does the reverser need to be in forwards or reverse for the dynamic brake to function?

Kind regards,
Chris

[chrisell]

I know next to nothing about how dynamic brakes work in TS, as I've never needed to use them myself, and given what you've already tried, I'm not sure what else to suggest. However, two questions pop to mind:

1) Are you absolutely sure that the DTG non-player locos are definitely using their dynamic brakes? I guess you could check by listening to the dynamic braking whirring, or check the dynamic control value in the Control State Dialog, now that it supports all vehicles in the consist.

2) Does the reverser need to be in forwards or reverse for the dynamic brake to function?

Kind regards,
Chris

Good tips. If you group a pair of DTG engines together and do a 80-20 braking test on dynamic brakes only, they slow down as if both engines are braking. ie. not a lot different to a single engine. Not the double distance I'm seeing on mine