Building trains - Another piglet question

I will give my knowledge on your questions and someone with more knowledge may be able to expand on it.

There are two main types of power, road power (in Run8 they are ES44's and SD70's) and everything else (SD40, SD45, and GP40).

The road power is used on all mainline trains as they provide more power and are designed with more safety features. All mainline trains must have one of these two engines on as the lead unit.

The others can be used as yard power, local train power, and can be put on most mainline trains either behind the learning road power or as a DPU (distributed power unit - units that are at the rear of the train or somewhere in the middle).

The easiest way to tell the difference when starting is just purely by size. All of the units do have labels indicating their model on the outside of the engine usually somewhere under the cab window. It is very small in Run8 so you have to right up close to it to read it.

The hpt requirements can be found on the BAR tab (right side in gray) for BNSF and on the WC tab (right side in black) for UP trains. As far as I'm aware the only thing we concern ourselves with is the overall weight for hpt calculation and coupler limits (for example a train exceeding 8500 tons needs a DPU because that is too much weight to be pulling from front only and will over stress the couplers.

How you put it together is kind of up to you. If you have a train that needs 6 units and requires DPU, you could put 4up front and 2 in the back, or 3 and 3. You probably want to avoid over powering one end or the other (say 5 up front and 1in the back) try to keep it somewhat even.

Most of the trains that we build will be fine with head end only and maybe some pushers in the back. Occasionally we get into some really long really heavy trains (M-BARLAC I'm looking at you, last departure was over 7k feet and almost 15k tons) that require say 6 or 7 units. In this case it's a good idea to put some helpers in the middle (maybe 3 up front, 2 in the middle, and 2 in the rear). Where they go in the middle again is kind of a judgement call. Using the M-BARLAC example, a good place for them would be behind the head end cut off cars that will be set off in La Mirada. This makes it easier for the set off to happen.

Hope that I have helped to answer most of your questions, and that someone with more in depth or real world knowledge can correct or add input where I may have been wrong or lacking.

Might be a good topic for a training video to go over engine types and uses as well as building various typesof trains.

Clint

In Run8, there are really only two things to worry about when running trains, and they only happen to player-controlled trains:

1. Breaking knuckles when pulling too hard on too much tonnage. This is easily solved with distributed power, and almost never needs mid-train DPUs. Most trains can be built to length or tonnage before mids are necessary. It is still tricky to start heavy trains on hills, even with DP, but that's part of the game.
2. Runaways on the way down. There is no modeling of DB failure in the game, but you can piss away your air if you're not careful. Learning balance braking (using dynamics and the automatic brake together) can be tricky, but it makes going down more fun than going up.

In general, if you have enough power to get up the hill, the game's physics will provide you with enough DB to make the downhill side easy too. As Clint said, the tabs in the registry are all you really need to know to get trains rolling in-game.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole, you'll need to find a copy of the System Special Instructions for each railroad, not the ABTH. UP's can be found here. (Train make-up instructions are Item 5B-5C.) A dated copy of BNSF's, here. (Train make-up instructions are Item 47.) Also note that in addition to the requirements outlined in the SSI, each subdivision will have its own unique requirements, which means you'll need to look at the Timetable for whatever piece of territory is in question. For example, the Mojave Subdivision would have restrictions for trains going that way listed in UP's Los Angeles Area Timetable.

The restrictions that are on the registry tabs are pretty close to providing a summary of those restrictions. Most of the folks on the server have a good idea of how to power the trains, too. Since the game only models the two problems above, it's pretty forgiving of mistakes, and the AI trains will roll with just about anything you slap together.