Railworks America

Does anyone know if it's possible to create custom displays for signals depending on which direction the points are set for?

Here in Australia, near where I live, there are signals which give letter indications that activate just before the red signal changes to yellow, and then green. What letters actually depends on which line the train will be moving on to.

The pessimist in me seems to think that this sounds a bit advanced for RW, but it's good to know for sure :).

If it isn't possible, can signals have custom textures for their colour displays? Or are they linked to a predefined colour texture via a hard coded blueprint?

Signals can be made into any shape or colors, the main dependency with signals is their scripts, the idea you describe, might need to be custom scripted, depending on what you want.

Signals don't have to look like signals, even; you could have a herd of sheep on the line for "stop", and have them walk off when you want to clear the signal.

What you're describing is a route indicator, and they're already in RW. I am currently in the middle of making an animated one ( the old ones took forever to change character, you can't do that with the texture set method ).

Wasn't expecting that you could do that. That's great news. Just out of curiosity, can you also set signals up to turn green when a level crossing is activated?

I would think so, you'd want to make the level crossing a signal too - in the UK gated ones *are* signals, if there's any left, the red board on the gates is "stop". But in RW, gates up = red signal, gates down = green, that seems simple enough. The signal before it would want to be a banner repeater of a sort, just with authority to stop the train.

That makes things interesting. My scenario is the following.

Train pulls into platform, sits for one minute, with crossing not yet activated. After a minute, the crossing barriers activate. Signal still at red. Once the barriers are fully lowered, the signal turns green, enabling the train to depart. If the train is express, then the signal will be green as soon as the train gets within a reasonable distance of the signal. Going by your description of the setup process, this sounds difficult to implement.

Worst case scenario, I might need to set up some kind of invisible 'ghost train' that runs express ahead of my train, to force the signal to stay at red when it's supposed to.

No, I think that's all doable ( although you'll have to find someone to script it all for you ). Everything you need including the proximity to the signal is already available. I'm not sure it will work with the AI, is the only issue, the AI takes a very primitive view of signals.

Ah thanks for this information. It all helps. Looking at an old photo of the station which would hypothetically include the route indicators, there used to be TV screens showing info about the train which departs next. It would show the scheduled departure time, the stations it stops at, and the actual departure time if it leaves late. The screen would update to show the next service once the train has triggered the signal at the end of the platform. If there is no departing service from the platform until the next day, then the display would shut off once triggered.

This is probably more ambitious than what I thought the route indicators were, but is there way to set this sort of thing up in this sim? Although a minor detail, it would certainly be favourable towards the nostalgic side of things, provided I'm patient enough to texture and set up the display sequence in the script. Instead of reverting to a colour, the signal at the end could tell the screen to change to the next in sequence, but this depends on the time of day. If the activity loads up at 5PM, then the screen would have already changed dozens of times.

Pipe dream?

With the amount of work to set up the track, signals, and crossings, I'm not even thinking about scenery at this stage.......

Hm, now this is getting tricky. The only way I can think of doing that is to make the departure board a clock(!). There is a way of tieing textures to specific values of controls, but I don't know what circumstances that will work in, it might only be inside cabs. Unfortunately right now there is very little information you can get about a scenario; you can't even directly read the time of day, you have to use a specific clock blueprint and I'm not familiar with them.