Will there still be timetables where departure and arrival times will be up to the second? I do get that the actual timetable has to be up to the second but why does the player needs to get the same information? It only happens occasionally there are services I can stick to the timetable so it's not like the game expects me to depart and arrive on the second. Can't you just remove the seconds from arrival and departure times that are displayed in the HUD?
In reality departure and arrival times are at xx:xx:00 or xx:xx:30. Unfortunately DTG allow the AI to work out the schedules on some routes and that results in those daft times with odd numbers of seconds (as well as making some of the scheduled running times a long way from where they should be). There have been a lot of complaints about this practice, and I’m hopeful that DTG have heard, and that in future we'll have proper running times input based on the real-life working timetables - but we shall see.
The seconds are useful for a few things, there’s quite a lot of functions that take place in which you can use the full time to gauge. The most common one is timing door closing to enable your timely departure.
All timetables should be made by an actual person, otherwise you get AI stuff that is totally unrealistic
That's for UK, in Germany afaik timetables are subdivided into tenths of a minute, i.e. 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, or 54 seconds. Those values are not really published but part of the driver's timetable, which I think includes not only the timings for stops at stations but also sometimes the points in time at which certain stations or signals shall be passed.
What an intriguing application of a metric concept to an imperial measure. You’d have thought splitting a minute into sixths would give enough precision for even the most meticulous of train planners while enabling the staff to work with round numbers actually marked on the clock face! I think I’m right in saying some trains on the Southern region in the UK are timed to 15 second intervals in particularly congested areas.
interesting, so In real life train drivers do depart on the second? I thought they had a little wiggle room in their timing. Sounds like a very hectic job. I thought this was only a practice in Japan.
I am not a Southern Region man myself but I do think that what is done down there with some services.
Not really, real life is far away from that, but in terms of an ideal world yes there would be this 6-second window. On lines with less frequent service they may only use full minutes, not sure about that. There's an example of a digital driver's timetable here with some timings on .0, .3 (18 seconds past the minute) and .5 (30 seconds past the minute): https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBuLa#/media/Datei:EBuLa.jpg
