Reduce scope of Locals ?

Hi Mike:

While playing with Florida earlier this year, I came to the same conclusion as you.

Here is a suggestion you may find as a balance, and I may have mentioned this before, certainly on my channel if you didn't catch it.

What I did in Florida (actually I only simulated Sanford Sub) that basically either gave the option to allow people to switch it, or after a period of time would automatically revert. This works well especially in yards with setoffs. It allowed me and others to continue to focus on running mains, but not grind us to a halt if enough crews suddenly where not available. What is cool is if they want to work it the work is there, if they don't want to work it the work gets flipped over.

This is how it is setup. Any place there is a yard you can have a number of designated setoff tracks. If the yards are too big you can get creative and block your train at the origin yard such as BAR so that you have a bit more flexibility in the outcomes. For each yard track that has been designated for setoff create an industry. Put in the returning symbol or tags for each car type. The only disadvantage to this is how loads and empties flip. Basically the industry will accept any car type that is possible with the various tags of the industries you would expect in that area. What worked well for me is for Sanford I didn't build the trains so the trains they created were already blocked loads at front empties in the back. This allowed me to be specific on a track setoff for loads and 1 for empties. Bigger yards you could get even more created. Set a time factor of the max number of hours this can sit without needing to be ready for the next train from this yard.

So with that being said this is how it works. All industries can still be in play with cars in them. They will likely be ready if no locals are running but otherwise continue to act as if it was all paused. If an available local operator is looking to run a complete run, they can go ahead and take those cars if they are still not expired, and tagged for the industries. They simply bring back after the work is done and it's available in the yard for the next outbound. If however no local operator is available, after the set number of hours the loads become empties, the empties become loads, and everything tags. It works just like any other industry, and acts as an AI style of local operation to simulate traffic.

With all the various yards such as Bakersfield, Mojave, even LA, and others, you should have plenty of options to try this. You could even set up a priority system in the registry so that things that need to be worked are shown where as others that are more automated show up as available. They too can be set to expire after a certain amount of time, or reset by an admin.

Hope that helps, as it worked very well for my operations on Sanford before I gave up on it.

Thanks

Sean

Never thought of that, I think that idea has even more potential. I think the example out on Cajon that 1 track that has 2 industries using it is a good example. As long as there isn't more than 1 industry with the same car type, that would work just as well.

Thanks

Sean

It actually works no matter what the car types are. I think the game strictly uses the industry tag to figure out what car is for which industry and how to tag it outbound.

One caveat is that your in-game switch lists, when you bring those up by local, will look funny if I remember correctly. I remember checking that to see if the cars were processing correctly when I was testing it out and being very confused. I didn't think it was working until I just manipulated the in-game clock to see each industry releasing its cars according to their set processing timer. Now I just grab the train and look at Tagger to see how it's coming along, and I don't really use the switch lists.

Interesting that you say there aren’t enough staff to run locals. To me, it feels as if, quite often, when I have some time for Run8, I look in the registry work list and it’s a hump or two, a handful of hostling jobs, and stuff that needs DS. Although, that having been said, the last time I ran a local (La Mirada) it took six hours and I don’t have that kind of time for Run8 very often!

I like the idea of running locals during non-dispatch hours which can be accomplished rather easily in the Bakersfield area with all the handthrows around BK and BAK. I've moved the LS906J (Buttonwillow Local) from BAK to Kern Junction several times just so someone can work the industries during non-dispatch times. If there's no objection, I'm going to open up the other Bakersfield locals to non-dispatch hours with instructions to use handthrows to navigate the mainlines, validate there are no mainline trains that might block your path and proceed at restricted speed at all times.


Dave