RMR043 – Tuning for Higher Throughput

Of course, now that all the sensors are connected, I can’t get enough of playing with the trains. 🙂

Yesterday I tried to see if the ‘throughput’ could be improved some, such that trains on the move follow up on each other a bit sooner. Not that such is anything near prototypical, rather the opposite, it was just an experiment.

There are a few Traincontroller settings in the Schedule Rules that can be changed to speed up the start of  trains that stand still because track ahead is reserved.

1. By default there is a ‘Start Delay’ after a green signal. This setting can be used to make things look more realistic when you have physical signals on your layout. On green, it takes a few seconds for the driver to react. This time is set to 2s by default. Since I do not have physical signals yet, I made this time 0. Trains start up 2s faster now than they originally did.

2. There are several choices in the Rules for the ‘Release of Blocks and Routes’. By default this is set to release ‘At Stop Marker’. With long blocks this means that the train must first reach the end of the block (where the stop marker usually is) before the junction street behind is released. I changed this to release ‘Upon Complete Entry’. Now the junction street is released at the moment the train is inside the block, before it is at the end.

This only works by the way if you specify train lengths, TC calculates when the train is completely inside the block, based on its speed and the length. With that I smuggled a bit, filled in values 20 cm shorter than the trains actually are. That speeds up things even a bit more.

The video shows a few minutes of train traffic with these settings. The effect of release ‘upon complete entry’ can clearly be seen at the end of the video, where the 2nd cargo train starts up well before the first reached its stop marker. I could also have reduced the scheduled stop times (now 10 seconds) but did not do that, it’s just about increased throughput when trains are ‘on the move’.

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