Creation Sharing New Timetable For Dresden - Riesa

Hi everyone,

I've been watching the excitement around the editor from the sidelines so far, but I couldn't resist any longer... My ambition is to make timetables! 3D modelling is absolutely beyond me, but I know a thing or two about railway operations and I'm pretty good at working with data like this, so I feel like I should be able to figure this out. I've chosen Dresden--Riesa for my first project because I know it very well, both in game and in real life -- it's my most played route in TSW, and I live in Dresden. That means I notice all the (perfectly reasonable) flaws in the original timetable, like the Dosto formations on RE15/RE18 being the wrong way round and things like that. I'd also like to have a few of the fun things I've been trying out in Free Roam properly in the timetable... class 103 InterCity railtour anyone? Plus, with Maintalbahn coming out soon, I want to see some AI desiros in Dresden...

So yeah, big ambitions. Having figured out how the editor works to the extent that I can spawn a formation on the map and make it go somewhere, and feeling reasonably confident that the rest is going to sort itself out somehow, I've moved on to research today. The idea being that learning the editor is only going to become easier over time as more tutorials come out, and figuring out what the trains are doing in real life is going to take a while. Here's where a fun afternoon with my spreadsheet editor of choice took me:


AI only services towards Berlin


Player drivable services towards Riesa (Leipzig)

All in all, this requires 8 formations:

• 1x 101 + IC coaches + 101: AI only Dresden--Warnemünde IC services
  
• 2x 101 + IC coaches: Playable Dresden--Frankfurt (--Stuttgart) IC services
  
• 1x 182 + IC coaches: 1 early morning and 1 late night AI only Flixtrain service to/from Köln
• 1x ICE 1: 1 AI only early morning/late night pair of ICE services to/from Hamburg, as well as 1 morning/evening pair of playable ICE services to Offenburg
• 1x ICE 3: Playable ICE services to Wiesbaden, plus 1 pair of AI trains to/from Berlin in the evening
  
• 2x Vectron + IC coaches: AI only Prague--Berlin EC services. These formations also make up the Prague--Zürich EuroNight, which is playable.

Next I'll work my way through the regional train timetables, spend some more time figuring out the editor, and be on the lookout for any more tutorials and answered questions regarding timetables. Going to set myself small goals for motivation, so I'll be reporting back when I get one (1) of these formations to do what I want it to do (or if I get stuck, lol).

 

that looks cool that

 

Update: I'm currently at the "works, but doesn't work well yet" stage of Matt's timetable problem diagnosis tutorial. The good news is: All the long distance trains are in the timetable and (this is the bad news) they're all getting into each other's way at Dresden Hbf. There's been construction work at Dresden resulting in platform closures for a good while now, so I can't just copy the platform allocations from the real world timetable. I've taken some educated guesses which I thought were pretty good but actually resulted in trains waiting for ages to get into Dresden Hbf. Should be a pretty easy fix with the playback tool and the log though. Then once long distance works *well*, I can start thinking about regional trains.

 

pls tell, that everything making dresden riesa's timetable perfect will be in one .pak-file, including repaints, and formations.

 

Today I tried to get the long-distance trains running smoothly. Turns out it was actually really easy! Just had to tweak a few track assignments and untick some "dispatch beyond"-s and everything started running exactly the way it should.

I have no doubt that everything is going to break again once I start adding regional trains, but I'm still very happy to have gotten this far. As a reward, I treated myself to taking a drive from Riesa to Dresden in the Vectron:


The Zürich--Praha EuroNight meets the Dresden--Köln Flixtrain near Abzweig Kottewitz.

Later in the day, I printed out some timetables and started to figure out how the different regional services interact with each other. Thanks to sledovani.55p.cz/, this is not nearly as difficult as it could have been, and I now understand all the different moves that the 12 formations on S1 do over the course of the day. Here's how that looked once I was done:



Now I'll "just" need to do the same thing for RE15, RE18, RB31 and RB50, and see how to make S2 and all the AI trains to Tharandt and Dresden-Klotzsche work with a reasonably small amount of formations while still including some empty moves etc. for them so Dresden Hbf feels properly alive. Then it's back to the editor...

 

No. I'm just making a timetable (and the formations I need for it). It's going to work with "vanilla" Train Sim World and won't require, or include, any other mods. It's much more important to me that someone who doesn't want to (or can't) heavily mod their game will be able to play this at all, than what colour the trains are for someone who has mods.

 

I'm taking a bit of a break from the editor until the timetables livestream on Thursday -- the last thing I want to do is spend days on putting services in only to learn of best practices I've not followed when I'm halfway done. I'd rather wait a few days if it means I'll be able to do a better job.

And I've not been idle either. I've continued working to understand what services I want to put into the timetable. For the regional trains, this meant working with the timetables to get an understanding of formations and ECS moves. I've also started thinking about freight trains. For these, I'd like to improve over the default timetable in two ways.

First, I'd like to have more information about the service (think length, weight, top speed, PZB mode, brake timings) when selecting the service from the main menu. That will be fairly easy for me to do, thanks to the work other forum members have been doing on this here, and here.

Second, I'd like a little more variety in what the freight trains actually do. The route has some destinations on it which it doesn't utilise right now. Dresden-Altstadt really should really be the starting point for a car train or two from Zwickau, for example.


Thanks to Free Roam mode, I can easily and quickly "prototype" a service like this and try it out without ever touching the editor! This way, at the point when I put anything on my "to put into the timetable" list, I already know the signalling can cope with me using paths the original timetable doesn't, and I won't try to make the player go into inaccessible areas. Plus, I'm having a lot of fun with it!

Großenhain Cottbuser Bahnhof doesn't get a lot of freight traffic in real life, but it doesn't get none at all either. Threading a few freight trains through the single track section to Priestewitz should be fun!

And there's a bunch of trains that turn off at Coswig towards Dresden-Friedrichstadt. These trains are going to be wonderful if you want to practice your Hl signals

And while we're on the subject of Coswig -- there are industrial spurs to a steelworks and a concrete sleeper factory modelled and accessible near that station, so why not give the 363 a bit more to do?

 

Another thing: Dresden gets a whole bunch of weird trains over the course of a year, ranging from brand-new vehicles from Alstom's factories in Bautzen and Görlitz to a wide variety of railtours. Well, 24 hours is a long time, and of course we can make layers appear in certain months only, so I think I'll be able to hide a few fun surprises in there. Here's a few ideas I've tried out so far:

Some brand-new Dostos arriving in Dresden-Neustadt...

...boldly going where no 628 has gone before...

...quick Dresden--Meißen railtours...


...InterCity railtours providing a nice opportunity for some coach shunting with the 363...

...and... wait, what on earth is he doing here?!

Should be pretty cool to see one of these (and more!) as a surprise once in a while, and my Free Roam experience these last few days proves they're a lot of fun to drive too!

 

Nice work.

 

This looks phenomenal. I really like the addition of random railtours and so on. This should be something that is included with every route too :P

Looking forward to the release

 

Doing this as a hobby rather than as a commercial project means I can just spend an entire afternoon turning this whole thing into an arts and crafts project to try and understand what exactly some trains (which will only be player drivable between Dresden Hbf and Neustadt!) are doing. But it's worth it – you'll see Desiros split and merge in Dresden Hbf during rush hour. I'm sure that'll make the station feel properly alive!

Just staring at the "raw" timetable absolutely none of this made any sense to me, but after aligning the timetables going either direction by time of day, tipp-ex-ing out any non-Trilex trains and making notes of the platform allocations, it suddenly fell into place.

This is the final (and most difficult) bit of Timetable Understanding, just in time for me to get back into the editor after the timetable livestream tomorrow.

 

Well done and there's a problem with the 423 it's the Platforms Dresden 55cm while Frankfurt am Main München Köln 76cm platform height (Bahnsteig ) that allows 423 422 to use them.

 

I was quite busy with other things today, but I still wanted to put some of what I learned in the Masterclass video yesterday to good use, so I made an S-Bahn service. Just the one, S 31714, starting in Dresden at 8:00 exactly and arriving in Meißen Triebischtal at 8:39. I put in all the real world departure times and let it simulate. The result was completely unexpected: the AI trains can't match the real-world timings! Even after tweaking the minimum load/unload time at the stops, the best result I could get was a 3 minute delay in Meißen! I then went to check the original DRA timetable -- turns out the original TSW S1 takes 8 minutes longer than the real trains do on an, in reality, 40 minute journey. Very strange. If anything, I'd have expected the TSW AI to be too fast compared to real trains, not too slow.

I'm going to have to do some experimenting to figure out what to do about this. I think I'll keep the original arrival/departure times in Meißen and add some time towards Dresden. My reasoning is that that should mean relatively minor timing changes (probably just a minute) at Coswig, which is the one place where S1 trains really interact with the rest of the timetable -- everywhere else they have their own tracks. It also helps me preserve one nice-to-have feature of the timetable: S-Bahn trains going either direction meet at Dresden Hbf and stand next to one another for a minute or two. First thing I'll try is adding exactly five minutes to the journey time, which would would achieve that, as S-Bahn trains run every 10 minutes between Pirna and Dresden-Neustadt. And then I guess I'll have to play it myself a couple of times to see if that feels good and achievable for players as well as the AI.

This is the first roadblock I'm hitting with this project. Might take some time to get past, but the most imporant thing to me is getting something that works 100% correctly before I than copy and paste it to the other 60-ish S1 trains per direction...

 

Hiya, I am so excited for this new timetable. I love Dresden - Riesa, but I’ve felt that the timetable has always been lacking and needs much more in it. Just a few questions:

1) Are you redoing the DRA timetable from scratch, or are you just adding onto the existing one?

2) Will you be including off-world destinations on the station and on-train PIS? (e.g RE50 trains only go to Riesa in game, but in reality they go to Leipzig, and the PISs say Leipzig Hbf)

3) Will you be adding services using the 642 once Maintalbahn releases? Afaik there are S8 services but also non-DB train services, will you include the services even that have different liveries irl?

Keep up the great work, we are all really excited for this

 

All-new from scratch and based on the real-life 2023 timetable.

Yes, to the best of my abilities. For some reason, you can't just type in off-world destinations. All the possible destinations are defined in the RouteDefinition file, which I can't change, and there are some pretty glaring omissions in there. For example, I can't have the PIS show Prague... Leipzig is in there though!

Yes! In fact, the 642 announcement was what made me start doing this in the first place. It says Westfrankenbahn rather than VVO on it, so I might as well use it on the Trilex services too at that point. This adds four extra trains per direction between Dresden Hbf and Dresden Neustadt most hours and will make Dresden Hbf feel much fuller, as the Trilex services have an almost 30 minute turnaround time there. There's never not going to be at least one Desiro Classic in Dresden Hbf, basically.

 

That's great to hear

Hmm that's weird. I am not very knowledgeble about these sorts of things but there are a few modders that are able edit the station directory and add more destinations to the list of off-map destinations. I believe that may be a way to overcome this problem. Not sure though!

Alright great

 

Editing the file itself is not the problem. I can just make a copy and add as many new destinations as I like to that. But then you've got two route definitions for DRA, so you'd have two different routes (with one timetable each) in the main menu instead of one route with two timetables. I guess I could probably make it so my route definition file replaces the original one, but that's a can of worms I'd rather not get into tbh. The PIS is just going to be a bit glitchy (but still better than it is right now) I'm afraid.

 

Okay that's fair.

I just had a look in the editor and the DRA station directory really does have hardly any any destinations in it, it's quite surprising.

I had a look into the Dresden - Chemnitz directory, and there are 305 destinations on there with everything you'd need for DRA. Would be cool if there would be a way to just copy that one and use it for DRA and have it not be too difficult, but oh well. Thanks for your responses

 

Matt did mention in a post that he can see the need for the ability to define new destinations outside of the Station Directory. So, maybe that is something they'll look at. But obviously they've not got any plans at the moment.

 

Nice Project! I am really excited to see the Vectron and Taurus do some intercity. Just a small question(I am working on a rapid transit tt, so this would help me out): Do you use the real train journeys( so the same train does the services as in real life) or do you try to minimise the ammount of used formations?

 

I'm kind of baffled by both of these station directories tbh. We'll just have to live with it for now, and if and when we get the ability to add off-world destinations that aren't in the station directory it wouldn't be a huge amount of work to go over the timetable and add them.

A bit of both. Depends on a bunch of factors: for RE50 and S1, I actually know what each formation does over the course of the day in real life, and most of them start and end their day somewhere on the map. If I want to include prototypical ECS moves, I need to have the same amount of trains that there are in real life. On RE15/RE18/RB31 and RE50, there is a mix of Talent II and Dosto trains, so if I want the right type of train at the right time, I need all the real life formations. But anywhere else, I just use as few trains as possible.

 

This was a really interesting read hearing your timetable progress - great job!

It would be great if route timetable updates like this for Dresden-Riesa etc could be available for those of us on console one day too, that would be awesome and gives older routes a new lease of life and a plethora of new gameplay.

 

Looking really good! Would you be willing to share your excel spreadsheet (even if you delete all the information relating to your timetable) so others could utilise the layout for their own timetables?

 

Good news: I have got a working S-Bahn! Yes, I did spend five days tinkering with the timings on this one Dresden--Meißen--Dresden journey, but I feel like that was time well spent given that all the other 60ish S1 trains are going to be copies of this one. It simulates without any timing-related warnings, the timings at Coswig are close enough to what they are in reality that I'm confident it's going to interact with everything else without issues, and all the arrival and departure times are at full or half minutes. We're not doing "wait until 07:39:24" in this timetable.

I've also paid attention to a few details: at Meißen, you don't have to close the passenger doors while changing ends. At Dresden Hbf, the AI train leaving the platform will show up on the PIS as going to Schöna via Bad Schandau and Pirna. (The original timetable doesn't have the intermediate stops.)

Last but not least, it's also quite nice to drive, even if I say so myself. For testing, I've been using a 143 on the four-coach service, and I've had no issues keeping up with the schedule. That is in dry weather -- unless anyone can tell me how to change the weather in Play-In-Editor, I'm simply going to keep assuming it'll be a fun challenge in the wet.


Since I'm going to make about 60 copies of this one service, I've done my best to keep it tidy and organized.

The next steps are going to be making all the copies of this service, editing them as required, adding ECS runs, and linking everything together so each formation does the same services it would do in real life. More on that once I've actually done it...

 

Fingers crossed! I absolutely agree. To me, timetables are the most meaningful feature of the public editor, given that leatning how to make them is actually pretty easy to learn (if hard to master), the workload is pretty achievable for one person, and you can actually completely transform older routes by including trains and gameplay that didn't exist when they came out.

Absolutely! The forum doesn't allow attaching OpenDocument files, so I had to .zip it.

 

I think I read somewhere that you can put the god-mode .pak into your DLC folder and it will be recognized by the editor programm. This means you could change the weather in god mode, although I haven't tested it.

 

There is a paragraph in my unofficial editor collection, currently sitting on page 44:

Q: How to change the season?
A: ts2.dbg.setlocaldatetime yyyy.mm.dd-hh.mm.ss
ts2.dbg.setlocaldatetime hh mm ss

ts2.dbg.setgroundsnow 0.5
ts2.dbg.setprecipitation 0.5
ts2.dbg.setwindstrength 0.5
ts2.dbg.setcloudiness 0.5
ts2.dbg.setfogdensity 0.05
(for "0.5" you can put any value from 0 to 1, e.g. 0.2, 0.123)
Volumetric fog is best seen at quite low values.

(Source: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/3-unrelated-questions.74752/)
​

Don't know if that helps

 

That's great! Thank you!

 

As a break from all the S-Bahn work, I also made a quick AI only layer today. This is line RB 45 Chemnitz--Riesa--Elsterwerda, which is completely missing from the original DTG timetable. Just two 143s with 2 Dostos each going back and forth between two portals, stopping at Riesa. They hang out at Riesa for about ten minutes, so they should do wonders to make that station feel a bit more lively.

 

tagging Joethefish because I think they gonna find this thread interesting

 

How did you get comments added to a layer? I press C and it won't work on the layer tab.

 

Well, I've been at home sick today, and I didn't have anything better to do, so... ta-dah!


Yes, that's the timetable for the seven main formations on S1 complete! (There's also five more that join at rush hour, but... one thing at a time.) I wish I could show you the whole thing, if only to show off, but it won't let me zoom out further. You'd need to have the editor on an ultrawide screen to see a full Dresden-Meißen-Dresden run. And...



...it simulated without any issues first time! Taking my time with the first S1 service certainly paid off.

There aren't really any exciting screenshots I can show here as it's just the S-Bahn going back and forth, but I'd still like to point out a few changes compared to the original timetable:

• ECS moves as per reality: as fun as the Dresden--Meißen ECS runs in the original timetable are to drive, they just spawn you on the S-Bahn platforms at Dresden Hbf. How did you even get there? Instead, we now have less exciting, but prototypical moves from Dresden-Altstadt to Dresden Hbf. One train also spends the night in one of the platforms at Meißen, with ECS moves Meißen Triebischtal - Meißen and back. While it sits there, trains run in both directions on the other track. The rush hour services will add more Dresden-Altstadt runs and also use the siding in Meißen.
• The main menu shows the complete route of the train and the train number, whereas in the original timetable it just reads "S1 Dresden-Meißen Triebischtal"
  This will allow you to easily distinguish the all-day (146 + 4 Dostos) and rush hour (143 + 2 Dostos) services in the menu. For ECS runs, I've also included which service the formation has last run or which service it will run next, which will be helpful to know if, like me, you like to string several services together.
• I've not set up any substititions yet, but I've got an idea on how to get it done without any 110s and 112s showing up in the back of my mind. I'll probably only work on that once I'm done with pretty much everything else though.

That's pretty much it! Just a nice, solid, realistic S1 timetable with a little quality of life feature or two. Gotta say I'm quite proud of it.

 

There's a bug there. You can't add a new comment on a layer, but you can paste comments you've copied from the main timetable to a layer.

 

Whew, today was a bit of a fight. I lost count of how many times I went through the simulate - read logs - troubleshoot - fix bug - simulate again - find new bug - etc. loop until I got everything working again. I now have all the S1 formations done. The five ones I added today provide rush hour only service, so they include quite a few interesting ECS moves. That made adding them good fun, but it also provided plenty of opportunities for trains to get in each other's way. At several points, I had train traffic jams going from Meißen to Meißen Triebischtal, back to Meißen and on all the way to Neusörnewitz...


Departing from Meißen in the early evening; one of the rush hour formations is already stabled in the siding.


By 1 AM, there are three trains sitting in the siding and one's even spending the night in the platform track, so the last Dresden-Meißen train of the day is running on the left hand track.


Having completed its last run of the day, one S1 train is trundling through Dresden Hbf track 12 on an ECS run from Pirna to Dresden-Altstadt, while another one is sitting in the turnaround track on the east end of the station getting ready for another trip to Meißen. Only this one train uses this siding all day. Sadly it's behind an invisible wall so this rare move isn't playable.


Long and short Dosto formations hanging out in Dresden-Altstadt. Once I've got all the formations that visit this yard in place, I'll look into adding some coach shunting.


East- and westbound S-Bahn services meeting at Dresden Hbf, six (not yet, but it will be once I've added S2 as well) times an hour, like clockwork. I have to say, it's very satisfying to watch this running at high speed in the timetable playback tool.

 

Pretty Excited for this new timetable. Great job

 

Evening everyone, time for a quick end-of-weekend update!

The bad news: everything is currently broken.


The good news: "Everything" now includes S2 and RE 50 services!

 

There we go! Shifting the S-Bahn by a few minutes gave me a lot more trouble than I had expected, but now it does work. Some S2 trains terminate at Dresden Hbf in the evening, which didn't work anymore with the new timings as they'd have had negative one minute to turn around. So now I have these trains run in the timings of the rush hour extra S1s at that time of evening, which also required a platform change... Also, the dispatcher absolutely didn't want to let the southbound S2 trains enter Dresden-Neustadt station at all. They'd just sit there for hours while the S1s kept going past. S1 and RE 50 were also quite unhappy about having to share tracks with each other between Coswig and Radebeul Ost. Anything that wasn't affected by this got stuck going into our out of Dresden Altstadt yard. And of course some of these issues prevented the others from appearing, because the trains got stuck at problem A before they ever reached problem B. Finding the problems and fixing them itself can't have taken more than fifteen minutes total, but I had to simulate the timetable about six times...

And then I noticed a mistake with my formations -- turns out the very last Dresden-Meißen-Dresden S1 run late at night is actually operated by an RE 50 Talent II set rather than, you know, an S-Bahn train. That wasn't hard to change, luckily, and running a Talent II S1 is pretty good fun for a change! Also, for some reason, the RE 50 that this set arrives in Dresden as runs ten minutes later in the hour than all the other ones. I took the liberty of shifting the timings a little further so the entire Riesa-Dresden run happens after midnight. That means you can play all the services operated by this set as it goes from Riesa to Dresden, then to Meißen, and back to Dresden, where you get to do a shunting move from the S-Bahn platforms into the lower part of the station, where it'll depart to Riesa a while later, all without ever going back to the main menu.

I assume some will be unhappy about me making these kinds of changes to the timetable, but I'm going more by the spirit of the real-life timetable than by the exact numbers on the page. If there's a cool train in reality that adds some variety to a mostly clockface timetable, making it playable is more important to me than having some numbers match up exactly.


A fun side-effect of shifting the S-Bahn by five minutes is that you get this encounter north of Dresden-Neustadt. I hadn't realised this was going to happen as RE 50 and the S-Bahn are on different layers. It was a delightful surprise.

This is a pretty huge milestone actually: Every single service that uses the S-Bahn tracks between Dresden Hbf and Coswig is now in there and working! With some luck, I'll never have to touch any of these ever again. Here's a little progress chart:

S-Bahn
[X] S1
[X] S1 rush-hour services
[X] S2
[X] RE 50

Elbe-Elster-Netz
[_] RE15/RE18/RB31 (one big chunk, as the trains switch lines in Dresden Hbf)

Diesel Trains Towards Dresden-Klotzsche (Playable between Dresden Hbf and Dresden-Neustadt)
[_] S8
[_] Trilex

AI only regional trains
[_] RB 33 (at Dresden-Neustadt)
[_] S3, RB 30, RE 3 (at Dresden Hbf)
[X] RB 45 (at Riesa)

Other
[_] Long Distance Trains towards Berlin (Playable between Dresden Hbf and Dresden-Neustadt)
[_] Long Distance Trains Dresden-Riesa
[_] Freight Trains
[_] Local Freight (at Coswig, Niederau, and Nünchritz Chemical Works)
[_] Railtours and Easter Eggs

I will need to redo the long distance trains as these were the very first thing I did in the Editor and there's a number of issues with them -- but I'm sure it'll take me a lot less time to implement this time with the practice I have now, and they'll be better than before.

 

I've spent a large part of this morning making a "trial train" for the Elbe-Elster-Network. You wouldn't really think so just from driving the trains in TSW, but these are quite complicated as trains switch lines in Dresden Hbf, there aren't a lot of options to adjust the timings as the turnaround time in Dresden is short, there's a single track section in Großenhain, RB31 and the REs go opposite directions on track 4 in Coswig... and it's a bit more difficult to layout as the RE and RB lines take different routes between Dresden Hbf and Coswig. This took ages:



Since I'll now need to simulate the timetable to find out the AI timings on this thing before I can do anything else, I thought I might as well make it worth my time and put in the Chemnitz AI trains at Dresden Hbf too. Those were really simple it's just two formations going back and forth between Dresden Hbf and a portal in one pattern that repeats every hour except at night. Adding these for the entire day was faster than making these two Dresden-Großenhain runs.

Anyway, I'll now simulate the whole thing so I have the results ready when I continue working.

Edit: I'll never call anything easy before successfully simulating it ever again.

My first guess is that the Dresden-Altstadt ECS services probably disagree with the Chemnitz trains about something, but that's a problem for future me.

Edit: future me here, turns out I must've hit Ctrl-Z one too many times, breaking the connection between an end service and start service node... which led to a Talent II just chilling in the middle of the station throat at Dresden Hbf, getting into the way of absolutely everything. Literally just connecting these two nodes again fixed everything.

 

Understanding how the trains are run in real life is essential to make a timetable that works and makes sense. Nowhere on the Dresden–Riesa route is this more true than on the Marienbrücke, the bridge between Dresden Mitte and Dresden-Neustadt. Try figuring out how what each track is used for just by looking at the thing on OpenStreetMap. I tried, and couldn't. So today I cycled to Dresden Mitte, looked towards the bridge for two hours, and took notes on what the trains were doing.

The thing about this section is that it takes the mostly six-track main line through Dresden down to five tracks, and the junctions at Dresden Mitte (towards Friedrichstadt) and Dresden Neustadt (towards Coswig or Klotzsche) are just a bit weird. The six-track sections are essentially just three right-hand running double-track lines next to each other. The two S-Bahn tracks stay separate on the bridge, but the other three do strange things: the easternmost one is only used northbound in normal operation but trains run both ways on both the other ones. Yeah, some trains just run northbound on the furthest left track out of five on the bridge... Once again, it made perfect sense the second I actually looked at it happening, but I could never have figured it out on my own. I'm looking forward to using my notes from today to set up up realistic paths through Dresden later.

(I also counted the freight trains – all but maybe one or two an hour went via Dresden-Friedrichstadt, not Neustadt. But don't worry, I'm perfectly happy to adjust numbers like that a little to make the game more fun.)

 

Some additional notes on this:

• While obviously I haven't watched the full 24hr timetable, the original one seems to simply treat tracks 4 and 5 on the bridge as a right-hand running double-track line, and it ignores track 3 altogether. Perfectly reasonable to do things like this given that they're not using Dresden-Neustadt platforms 3+4 anyway, but it means that even if they wanted to, DTG couldn't add Desiros to their DRA timetable because the southbound trains from Dresden-Neustadt platform 4 would conflict with... any northbound train.
• I've had some more fun in Free Roam going back and forth between Dresden Hbf and Neustadt in a 628, going the wrong way on DTG's "double track" line to try and break the signalling. Everything worked very nicely! DRA has one of the more solid signalling implementations in TSW, and the signals are positioned in such a way that creating a deadlock should be pretty much impossible. You even get proper route indicators for tracks that are completely unused in the original timetable! I was super happy seeing Zs2v "A" or "F" light up at Dresden-Neustadt.
  
• Being satisified that the original paths can work in TSW, I added go vias to the RE 50 trains so they use the proper tracks on the bridge (3 northbound, 4 southbound) and anything I implement from now on will have the proper paths right from the start. There are a good few possible paths from Dresden-Neustadt to Hbf, which should add some nice variety to the route. Especially if you're driving a freight train on this passenger-focused part of the line, you'll end up having some fun interactions with the other trains.

Actually implementing many of these new paths is going to have wait until I get my hands on Maintalbahn and the 642, as they're taken by diesel trains serving Dresden-Neustadt platforms 3 and 4, or long distance and freight trains, but why not start looking forward to them early, right?

 

Hi all, since you haven't heard from me in a few days, I'd just like to reassure everyone that both myself and this project are alive and well. Here's what's happening right now:



Yeah, it's still the Elbe-Elster Network. These trains are honestly the biggest and most difficult individual part of the timetable... as you can see, there's still a lot of work left until it's done, but it's coming along nicely!

 

Good god, I've been reading through your progress and this is certainly amazing. Fantastic work, looking forward to be able to drive on this timetable!

 

On a clockface timetable, you'll quickly end up with a fairly predictable pattern for what the services and formations do. Copy and paste, shift timings, rename services, done. However:



Yeah. It makes my brain hurt too. It looks like this because:

• Trains have a short turnaround at Dresden Hbf, and (except late at night) switch lines there. A train that arrived in Dresden as an RB 31 will depart as an RE 15 or RE 18, and vice versa.
• Two formations are locomotive hauled Dostos. For those, I've implemented the original diagrams, so the right type of train shows up at the right time. The other formations are all Talent II sets. These I re-use them as soon as possible after they fall off the edge of the flat earth north of Großenhain. That allows me to use a couple fewer formations, which is good for performance.
• Most RB 31 trains run to Elsterwerda-Biehla, but some stay on the map and terminate at Coswig or Großenhain. This means there's a lot of variation in how long it takes a train to do an out-and-back run from Dresden Hbf, which makes the diagrams more complicated.

As usual, adding all these new services (there are over 900 now, though of course all the ones that just go from [station immediately before portal] to [portal] are included in that) has completely broken everything. That's okay though. As the timetable becomes more complicated and more difficult to make work, so I become more experienced and skilled at working on it.

 

Doing the Niddertalbahn timetable makes my brain hurt at times, I think attempting your undertaking would make it explode. Very impressed with the progress you've made!

 

This looks FANTASTIC! I also had the same thoughts about user created timetables when the editor was announced.
Any timetable work at all would make my brain explode so I appreciate the work being put into this.

 

Once you get started with it and understand how it all works, it's a fairly straightforward and interesting tool to use. Fixing any issues that arise from the simulation, that's the time consuming part.

 

That's exactly it. Adding a million trains to a layer is extremely straightforward and pretty quick once you've got a little practice with the tools. The part that takes forever is renaming all the services from "R_day_18xxx_DH-DGC_16" to "RE18_day4_18406_DH-DGC", and adding friendly names (which the player will see in the menu). Now, I don't technically need to give everything accurate names, but it makes debugging so much easier! It means I can already tell what a train is trying to achieve just from glancing at the simulation log... which is the second part that takes forever, and the most difficult one. Bascally, once you've added all your shiny new services, your timetable will simply not work anymore. Figuring out why, and fixing it, that's the one step where you really have to think about what you're doing.

 

Honestly I'm quite impressed by your Niddertalbahn, because it's a single track route all the way. On my double-track lines I mostly just have to make sure trains are using the right one and everything will probably work. I've only really got the little single track section between Priestewitz and Großenhain Cottb Bf and I already had to put in a whole bunch of dependencies to stop the trains from deadlocking.

 

The timetable now simulates successfully! Here's what was wrong with it:

• A poorly chosen spawn location for one formation blocked another train in such a way that it caused a deadlock once it became active
• For two hours in the early morning, RB31 runs at a 30 minute interval between Dresden and Coswig. That extra train grabbed its route out of the portal too early, causing a deadlock with the regular formation at Dresden Hbf
• Dresden-bound RB31 services can't "dispatch beyond" Coswig as they switch from being a playable service to AI-only there. If the westbound RB31 service in the same hour terminates at Coswig, it therefore gets the opportunity to grab a route until a Zwischensignal in the middle of track 5, again causing a deadlock.

Essentially all I had to do was move a formation spawn location, adjust some service start times, and add go vias and dependencies to a few services that terminate at Coswig, but with figuring out what actually went wrong, and simulating the timetable after each fix, it still took several hours over two days. Now I'll need to turn my attention to the about 750 lines of timing-related issues in the log file...