So like solicitr suspected the HL/BP gauge measures the pressure at the locomotive. There would be no realistic way to measure the brake pipe pressure on the whole train. You could put a sensor on each wagon and then calculate an average but this is not something that I am aware of having been done in reality. Even at stationary conditions (no change in the quantity with respect to time) the pressure will not be the same at the front and the rear of the train due to something called "head loss". This effect increases with the length of the train so is quite negligible on passenger trains, especially those with a main reservoir pipe or a rear compressor. In any case, when the brake pipe pressure is reduced during a brake application, or the brake pipe pressure is increased when the brake pipe is charged the front of the train will "lead" the rear (higher during charging, lower during venting). The difference can be quite significant. Below is an example graph of a train in emergency with and without brake pipe accelerator devices (each wagon vents it's brake pipe during emergency) As you can see from the dotted curve (without BPA) the rear can lag behind by up to 10 seconds, and this is a relatively short (around 400m) train in emergency where the force on the fluid is much greater than during service braking or charging. Not sure how it is taking 5 minutes for the whole train to recharge after an emergency brake application though, noir , what kind of train is that?
When I was testing it I started some random freight service in Gemünden on MSB, but for example in Nahverkehr Dresden most freights starting in Dresden should easily show you that too.
Well, pumping up the brake pipe logically would take a lot longer than emptying it. Pumping up 200 m of pipe to 5 newtons ought to take more than a trivial amount of time.
BTW, a nice little detail on the El Cajon model SD40- haven't seen this on any other loco: when your consist goes around a curve you can see the airflow gauge flicker; it's effectively zero but the movement of the hoses is still creating "ripples" in the BP.
There is a mod that enables BR 101 substitution on freight trains across the board, but I believe in BRO the BR 101 substitutes also by default.
It depends what the initial condition is. Pumping up the main reservoir line and especially the auxiliary reservoirs (usually 100-200 L on coaches) will absolutely take 5 minutes, at least for a decently long train. Charging the brake pipe after a dump, but with charged auxiliary reservoirs, will be significantly faster though since you have the main reservoir line (passenger coaches) to feed the brake pipe and the brake pipe volume is much smaller than the aux reservoirs. UIC brake pipes are 1.25 inches in diameter and the length of the brake pipe is something like length + width since it goes to the side of the body and back, so for a IC coach that's a little below 30 meters. That gives a volume of 22 L so only 10-20% of the auxiliary reservoir.
The BR101 is not really setup to realistically drive freight trains at the moment (that might change in the future but it might not, there's a lot of things that would need to be implemented). For example the brake mode is fixed "R" which is not suitable for freight trains. EDIT: Also compare the time it takes to charge the BP on freight trains with the BR101, against for example the BR185. If the BR185 is equally slow it might be a wagon issue.
That's an issue with a lot of the DRA fright formations. On start up the are completely empty. HL manometer jumps up to 5bar pretty fast, but it still takes 5 - 7 mins for the brakes to release. The HBL manometer indicates that air is still pumped into the train. You can see the issue at the start of this video:
It's not that the train starts without air, I'm pretty sure the rear starts at around 3.4 bar, but the DRA wagons are very slow to charge. This issue was somewhat resolved (not perfectly) on KWG. I made some tweaks to all the wagons used there and the BR185. However, the BR185 suffers from an issue (same as the DRA version) where the automatic overcharge is too weak so the brake pipe only goes up to about 4.9 when releasing the brakes and then very slowly rises to 5.0 bar. IRL it would jump up to around 5.1-5.2 bar automatically which speeds up release. The BR101 is much better in this regard. It overcharges more, by itself, so it probably suffers less from this issue with freight wagons. Still, you probably should at least expect 2 minutes to recharge the brake pipe from ~ 3.4 bar.
Fair enough, could be that way too. I'd totally be fine with two minutes, just the 7mins the way it's shown ingame is pretty long for just charging the BP.
