Approaching West Ealing running about 5 late with 2P21 0734 Reading to Paddington, got checked down to a red. First thought was it’s a saved game, ghost of the red signal bug. However on checking the 2D map see a train ahead of me, fast forward with free camera to Ealing Broadway and looks like this was the service from Greenford, booked to follow. Cool, if that is the case and the AI signaller can now deviate from the script. Indeed, thank you DTG. What didn’t update was the platform PIS which still showed my service as number one, but guess that is something to yet be refined. Edit: Well as regards PIS it did sort of update as when I arrived at EB the train from Greenford had vanished off the screen and I was shown as (now) 9’ late.
There seems to be a ‘first past the post’ system which regulates who will get priority. The distance between the ‘post’ and the signal seems to vary with location. I also often find that a route won’t be set further down the line until a task is completed such as a station stop which can allow trains to sneak in front.
Indeed, the signaller can change the order of trains if they are coming from two branches into one (such as Greenford/mainline, or one of the many branches of the Brighton Mainline). If the train booked to merge first is late, the signaller will path the other train in front of it. However the signaller cannot change the path of the trains, only the order (where applicable). This has been a thing for a long time - it was in TSW2 before Rush Hour according to my memory of the streams.
Yes I have been routed behind a few 158s on MML from East Midlands Parkway to Nottingham due to the TPWS trips causing me to be delayed, which took me as a surprise as I hadn't seen his in TSW before.
I remember there was a run on Cathcart where if you deliberately ran a bit slowly at the start, you missed your path at the junction and got yourself stuck behind another train, which it was fun to follow all the way to Glasgow Central. There are a few similar ones in the 'Awesome TSW Service Mode Runs' thread.
It is actually dynamic, sort of who comes first gets the cake. Matt explained that in detail in an old thread I can't find now due to the sheer amount of posts and sometimes ambiguously named topics on this forum.
I don't know if Matt explained it in the forums - I only heard it in a stream, but by using the search function (keyword: dispatcher; posted by member: DTG Matt) I found this.
It's been there since day 1 to be honest. It was a fundamental design goal that the dispatcher figure things out on the fly, rather than TSC's approach of rigidly following a predetermined plan at all times. As noted, it can't re-route, but trains are basically first-past-the-post as someone noted, and we use the "dispatch beyond" feature in some cases to hold a path back to allow the chance for other trains freedom to move, as other wise the signalling system blocks out big chunks of line ahead in order to establish your green (particularly with huge blocks like on US routes). Matt.
I noticed that it's been there since at least the original Isle of Wight release. I accidentally left the game running just after I'd switched ends at Shanklin while I went elsewhere for 10-15 minutes or so, then upon returning noticed that the dispatcher had cleared the other service up the line so we ended up passing at Sandown rather than Ryde St Johns Road, thereby minimising the disruption to the (virtual) line.
In terms of priority setting, do (for instance) express passenger trains book out blocks further ahead than freight trains to give them a degree of priority?
No, there isn't much in "priority" tbh - booking out paths further ahead will cause more blockages and slow things down more than speed things up (considering the whole network rather than just that one service, that is) - but when we sim timetables, we can see if trains get held up and if we notice a passenger train is getting held up by a freight one we can either re-route, add delays, put in dependencies or put in a no-dispatch-beyond on the freight to ensure that it can't grab it. Generally a pass we do at the end of a successful timetable sim is to review the log - we can see every train held for at least 1 minute (and every time it was held) - then evaluate the overall performance of the timetable, make adjustments and so forth. The more constraints you put in, the less flexible the timetable is and the more you end up with freight trains having odd waits that might not make sense etc, so try to use it sparingly. Matt.
