Railworks America

I hadn't driven the Dash-9 and SD70ACe in a while and decided to fire them up in Free Roam yesterday. Both units were not showing any brake cylinder pressure (green bar) in the simple HUD (sorry for my explanation as I'm not an engineer). I cleared the cache, did a verify on Steam (49 files had to be re-verified) and fired up TS14 and still no go. Does anyone have any idea as to what I need to do to fix this issue.

Thanks,

Anybody have any ideas?

After 6 months with no response I thought I'd try bringing up my issue one more time. As I'm not a programing expert and wouldn't know what files to start looking into let alone understand them, I'm wondering if I were to delete (backing up first) both the Dash9Pack01 and SD70Pack01 folders and let Steam do a reinstall that this might fix my problem.

Responses appreciated.

Regards,

I'm going to say that this is a .bin file issue. From experience, I know that some on some trains, the HUD ammeter is blank, but if you drop in the correct lines of coding into the correct engine.bin file (not in the simulation folder, but the car folder), the HUD ammeter will display a reading. I wish I could be more certain, but I haven't gotten around to digging through the .bin file to locate the HUD brake pressure command lines.

Fanrailer is right, there is no BrakeCylinderPressurePSI section in the locomotive blueprint of either Dash9 or SD70ACE.

So there is no need to re-install or update that piece of DLC. as it is broken from the start.

You copy the lines over from another default engine, like the old ES44.
Make sure to add LocoBrakeCylinderPressurePSI, as TrainBrakeCylinderPressurePSI is meaningless.

The Brake Cylinder Pressure gauge on the control stand/HUD is linked to the nearest brake cylinder air line on the truck under the cab. No locomotive knows about any brake cylinder pressure on the trailing train. Even the EOTD relays back only the train line pressure, which is the AirBrakePipePressurePSI control value in the engine blueprint.

By properly linking the gauges to the relevant ControlValues you can simulate prototypical operation of both automatich train brake and independent locomotive brakes.
If we would have both manual and automatic bail-off on the independents, we would be true to prototype for US operations. Now, only Run8 has these features.

Note that DTG completely borked the independent brake with their "advanced braking" script in the newer engines.

If you are unsure how to modify the engine bin, drop me a PM and I'll try to send my files over to you.

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:If we would have both manual and automatic bail-off on the independents, we would be true to prototype for US operations. Now, only Run8 has these features.

The FEF-3 (when it's released) comes extremely close, and has the most realistic (actually, the only) bail-off simulation in TS. It even simulates the spring-loading of the engine brake handle on the 8-ET stand.

mrennie wrote:

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:If we would have both manual and automatic bail-off on the independents, we would be true to prototype for US operations. Now, only Run8 has these features.

The FEF-3 (when it's released) comes extremely close, and has the most realistic (actually, the only) bail-off simulation in TS. It even simulates the spring-loading of the engine brake handle on the 8-ET stand.

Cool! Is the tender considered a part of the locomotive in this respect, or is it part of the train with a triple valve and no bail-off?

8-ET is that a passenger formula? Using electric propagation that only the latest, best and most luxurious streamliners had?
AFAIK, C&O's latest 4-8-4's were factory equiped with electric progapagation but appararently also it was never used as such.

Can you switch your engine from passenger to freight mode, with appropriate changes in EQ and train line pressure? How about graduated release in passenger mode?

Simulated bail-off you say? AFAIK the sim treats the whole train as one unit, locos included. You can increase loco brake cylinder pressure using the independent brake handle, but not decrease it. A decrease to zero PsI effectively is a bail-off.

For those who don't know, bailing off the locomotive brakes means releasing the locomotive brakes while the automatic train brake stays applied. The automatic bail-off is necessary when the locomotives are in dynamic braking, to prevent stalling their wheels.
Manual bailing off the locomotive brakes is used when the engineer needs to "stretch" the train, by applying locomotive power against the braking train. Having two air brake systems explains the need for both train line "air pipe" and brake cylinder pressure gauges.
The engineer can only guess the brake cylinder pressure on the cars in his train by guestimating how this much reduction of the train line results in that amount of brake cylinder pressure in the cars. He positively knows the locomotive brake cylinder pressure by reading its gauge. A bailed off locomotive reads 0 PsI, a fully braked locomotive reads maximum pressure, depending on the type of locomotive brakes, i.e. single clasp, double clasp, disc, drum, etc.

Therefor, it is refreshing to learn that the independent developers know their stuff and how to apply it to the sim.

Looking very much forward to your FEF-3. She'll probably be the standard to measure all steam locomotives against.

Thanks for the responses guys. I didn't realize that these particular locos were messed up from the get go, and diving into the bin file(s) and trying to fix them is way above my pay grade.

Kanawha, I've sent you a PM.

Once again, thanks a bunch!

Regards,