Yesterday I ran a service with the Class 66 on SEHS; the one where you go from Strood to Hoo Jct and then back up to Faversham. I found that on a flat bit of track, a Class 66 + 15 JNA wagons would take absolutely ages to reach 60 mph. On a 0,5% gradient it was even worse: the train couldn't maintain 45 mph. 15 loaded JNA wagons weighs about 1350 tonnes; that's not a particularly heavy train, even by European standards. Surely a Class 66 should be able to handle this a bit better?
I think it only has about 2000 horsepower compared to let's say a traxx which has more than double.. I do seem to remember from some coworkers it's not really that great and sluggish but that's from the 66's in belgium, so no clue if that's the case for the uk ones
I've had a bug appear on that scenario, the loco brake kept applying it's self, check bogie gauges to make sure this is not happening.
I seem to have similar, gets to 40mph and then just stops accellerating... Wikipedia says 3000 at rail HP
3000HP but geared to haul 75 mph freight too. Ofc it's all about the tractive effort, not raw HP. Sounds like the simugraph may need a tweak!
That's very perculear (They're both 66/0s) but uninstalling GWE and forcing it to use the ECW 66, for me, it is now accelerating beyond 35mph. I knew East Coastway introduced some physics changes to the 66, but I always thought it was to do with the brakes.
The Class 59 is almost a replica of the SD40-2, yes. Although the Class 66 is fundamentally the same platform, it also has a newer prime mover series (EMD 12N-710) and traction motors. Cheers
Under the assumption that a Class 66 has about 2250 kW (3000 HP) available for traction and that the power is relatively constant w.r.t speed, at 45 mph the available tractive effort is (2250 kW / (45 mph)) ~ 112 kN Driving up a 0.5% gradient requires 0.005*1480*9.81 ~ 73 kN There is also a constant drag force due to running on rails/wheel bears (rolling resistance) which is around 1.5 Newton/tonne or for the whole train ~ 2 kN We see that there is a surplus of about 37 kN, but there is significant drag from wind at any speed above around 20 km/h. This force is iirc quadratic w.r.t speed so doubling the speed quadruples the drag force and so on. It is hard to estimate how strong this drag would be (to get really accurate you'd need computational fluid dynamics software but there are some approximations. One of such approximations can be found on page 46 in https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra...ANCE OF A FREIGHT TRAIN TO FORWARD MOTION.PDF At 0.5 % grade the net force after subtracting the grade resistance is 39 kN. For the train to not accelerate this requires a total resistance (air + rolling) of 2.7 kgf/tonne (39 / 1480 / 9.81 * 1000) which is within the interval of the curves on page 46. Either the train stops accelerating at 45 mph or it reaches a couple of mph more. If the tractive effort or drag at 45 mph is incorrect for the Class 66 + JNA in TSW2 it is probably not significantly incorrect.
Lots of maths & science & tech specs here, I've just done the Hoo Runaround, once the speed limits permitted I nailed my 66's throttle open & it easily made 65mph!
Interesting; I didn't know it could pull it from either DLC. I'll try this as well, since I never play GWE anyway.
I am not sure if this is accurate. I own both SEHS and GWE, but not ECW, and the Class 66 (from GWE) does not appear in the timetable roster. It is possible that the presence of ECW "unlocks" the freight services from which the GWE Class 66 can be pulled, but it does not appear on its own. I wonder if anyone else can confirm whether the GWE Class 66 does, in fact, substitute onto this route. Cheers
You need East Coastway to get the services as it uses the ECW wagons. I've re-installed GWE and now have an extra EWS livery, although interestingly (and slightly annoyingly) I can't select the DB Schenker livery from GWE. The middle EWS livery is the Great Western 66. I've selected that and it was accelerating, albeit slowly - got to 40mph by the end of the first tunnel after Strood. For context, the East Coastway one (I drove afterwards) got up to 39mph (with a bit more notch 8 action), so I don't know why it suddenly got more powerful after uninstalling GWE, maybe I was just driving it differently. Also, TRAINBOW!
The big difference is the weight of the SD40-2 vs the Class 59. Although the listed tractive effort are nearly the same (556 kN vs 540 kN) the 28t axle load of the SD40-2 means it only needs about 75% of the adhesion the Class 59 does to develop the same traction. Some trivia: In northern Sweden we have shunting locomotives with 30 tonne of ballast to weigh 150t just so that they have enough traction to shunt the heavy iron ore trains (up to 8240t in total wagon weight). The locomotives (called T46) use the 12-cylinder version of the EMD 645E and were built in the 70s. Technically they could be ballasted another 30t to achieve the 30t axle load on the Iron Ore Line (if the frames etc can handle it). The IORE locos are ballasted up to 180t per single unit which allows them a maximum of 700 kN of tractive effort which makes them stronger than the Dash-9s/ES44DC but slightly weaker than the AC44/ES44AC (180'000 lbf or 800 kN) but ofc much more powerful (7200hp vs 4400hp).
I see. That is unfortunate; ECW does not terribly interest me so I think I will continue to forgo the extra services. Cheers
This is concerning. I know that the physics of rolling stock from different DLCs can be different (take the Dosto wagons in MSB etc vs HBL as an example) but I wasn't aware that layers could randomly swap. That would make it harder to choose to use rolling stock from a DLC with "better" physics (for example if it was fixed in one DLC but not the other). Not sure why DTG doesn't make it so that each route calls the same object/class (locomotive) instead of there being one for each route. They did it this way back in TS20XX during the RSC era (at least for certain assets like the class66packX). Does anyone know if there is a way to check from which layer the locomotive/wagons come from?
IIRC from the East Coastway preview, when they built Great Western, they got a manual and blueprints apparently for the class 66/0, and used that, and after release discovered the manual and so on only applied to locomotive 66001, so for ECW they built a more generic one using different materials, and did some things with the brakes (notably having the air flow go higher than 10, and added different timings), but wasn't aware of any other changes to the physics, and as I demonstrated in my above post the discrepancy is basically negligible regarding acceleration. Not sure about other stock but you can instantly tell the difference between the GWE 66 and the ECW 66 by looking at the screen above the windscreen - the GWE one will have bright green text, whereas the ECW one will have more text, and it'll be in cyan (IIRC the font is different too). On Southeastern, the 66 will always default to the East Coastway one, however - you need to specifically tell it to use the Great Western one.
I've been driving various activities with the Class 66 recently, including tutorials, and have realized that most problems do indeed involve failing to fully release the brakes. This becomes especially important in activities that involve trains with a 66 at both ends in which you're required to drive from both cabs. When shutting down a class 66 cab, completely releasing the Automatic Brake is essential, but the instructions too often fail to mention this. I thought I had taken a screenshot of the brake gauge at various settings, but can't find those images, so I'll take them again and edit this message afterward. EDIT: all three brake gauges must look like this: To achieve this, you must hold the automatic brake control in the release position until all 3 gauges look like the screenshot above!
