Railworks America

I have been looking into the bin files of some of the rolling stock. I see some of them them have a cargo compartment section and some don't have any info there. The cargo compartment appears to be for rolling stock that you can load and unload. I recently downloaded some new boxcars by Michael Stephan and he said he tried to improve the physics but really didnt go into what he did. So I took a look at his files and see that he aded a cargo compartment to his boxcar's bin files.

I end up with two variables. Mass and Capacity. But there is no clue as to what these really are. So I conclude that MASS is the weight of an empty car. The value for the default boxcar is 27.3960. My question is, is that tons? Or is the decimal point really a comma and it means 27 thousand and 396 pounds? Or is it some other system's weight configuration. How much would a real empty boxcar weigh? 27 tons or 27,000 pounds/13.5tons?

In his cargo compartment Michael added the value of 60.7900 to the CAPACITY of it. Is this the new total weight of the car and load or just the weight of the cargo? Is it tons or pounds or?

I am also assuming if you select the car in a scenario and load it, it will be heavier to pull?

Has anyone attempted at doing any of this before. I do not find much with a search results on several forums.

Hi Bob,

I do not if you want to spend the money but this site might have what you are looking for.

http://www.railfandepot.com/servlet/the ... Car/Detail

Thanks sleepyto, but at this time that is a little expensive for me. Maybe when I get my Christmas bonus and when I learn how to use this 3D Canvas program. That book looks really nice for a modeler. Anyway from the screenshots of the book the pictures of the boxcar and the caboose show their LT WEIGHT and looking in the BIN files of the default boxcar and caboose it appears the weights in there are TONS. But I am betting they are not US Tons.

Bob, I did a quick Google and found this: http://www.railforum.com/cgi-bin/ultima ... 6/122.html just a few other hits, tho. Not that I'm a designer, just a real curious driver.

EDIT: sometimes I love Google other times NOT! Like, I didn't search for the curb weight of a Honda Civic, but that popped up too. *sigh*

I looked at an online weight converter and came up with this:

1 ton is 0.907184584393794 metric tons (tonnes)

Therefore, whether you use tons (2000 lbs) or tonnes (1000 Kg), there really isn't much difference.

Thanks Dick, your right not much difference.

Well I did what Michael did but adjusted the weights to what was on the side of the cars textures. I have the 60 foot boxcar weighing 37.6400 tons empty. Put a cargo component in and made it's capacity 90.0000 tons. Using an SW1200 with 12 boxcars for my testing. Made 1 train empty and the other loaded. The new weights on the empties make the boxcars 10 ton heavier each. You can tell the difference, with unmodified boxcars it jerked forward pretty quickly. With modified empties, it was not as quick to accelerate, but it does get going after a bit. I only used notch 1 to see how long it would take to get to yard speed. The loaded train barely took out the slack on notch 1 and I had to go to notch 3 to make it go. This makes a significant difference in the "feel" f driving. It also took the loaded train longer to stop.

So now I have a semi interactive boxcar because of adding the cargo component. Going to look at some of the animated car's loads and see if I can actually make all the cars interactive to some extent.

Now if I only new what all those other values are, like for air pressure and friction.

I took a look around the wagon blue print files and the only way to put give a cargo a mass value is for it to be a bulk cargo. Cargos defined as containers, such as in a flat car, do not have an entry for capacity (mass), so you would have to include the cargo weight in with the unloaded weight to simulate the heaviest that the wagon can be.

Hi,

If you allow me to bump up an old thread:

I think you can mix the cargo definitions, giving container cargos a weight (capacity) too. Have a look at the excerpt from one of my flatcars below. I am not 100% sure if it works as it should. The interactive cargo works, you can use the container crane. If the weight works... I don't actually know for sure.

What I am sure about now is that the 'capacity' for 'bulkfreight' loads is in tons, be they metric or imperial, but never ever in pounds as stated in the RW wiki. Try entering a lbs value there, then load the car in the scenario editor and then try to get it to move. It simply has got be in tons.

By the way, Bob, the physics update I did a while ago was mostly concerned with the brakes. I edited some of the brake section values to more closely resemble those of the state-of-the-art MSTS realism settings, which seems to have had a positive effect on train handling, but I know much too little about real trains to be able to tell how realistic it really got.

Code: Select all

            <CargoComponent>
            <cCargoComponentBlueprint>
               <CargoDef>
                  <cContainerCargoDef d:id="15673352">
                     <Position>
                        <cHcRMatrix4x4>
                           <Element>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F43F" d:precision="string">1.2500</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="0000000000000000" d:precision="string">0.0000</e>
                              <e d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</e>
                           </Element>
                        </cHcRMatrix4x4>
                     </Position>
                  </cContainerCargoDef>
                  <cBulkCargoDef d:id="23752712">
                     <TriggerBox>
                        <cHcR3dBox>
                           <Width d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</Width>
                           <Height d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</Height>
                           <Depth d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="000000000000F03F" d:precision="string">1.0000</Depth>
                           <Element/>
                        </cHcR3dBox>
                     </TriggerBox>
                     <Capacity d:type="sFloat32" d:alt_encoding="00000000D7A33E40" d:precision="string">30.6400</Capacity>
                     <BulkFreightType d:type="cDeltaString">BulkFreight</BulkFreightType>
                     <AnimationId d:type="cDeltaString"></AnimationId>
                  </cBulkCargoDef>
               </CargoDef>
               <CargoBlueprintID>
                  <iBlueprintLibrary-cAbsoluteBlueprintID>
                     <BlueprintSetID>
                        <iBlueprintLibrary-cBlueprintSetID>
                           <Provider d:type="cDeltaString">GreatNortherner</Provider>
                           <Product d:type="cDeltaString">SteamEra</Product>
                        </iBlueprintLibrary-cBlueprintSetID>
                     </BlueprintSetID>
                     <BlueprintID d:type="cDeltaString">RailVehicles\Freight\Loads\wooden crate x1.xml</BlueprintID>
                  </iBlueprintLibrary-cAbsoluteBlueprintID>
               </CargoBlueprintID>
            </cCargoComponentBlueprint>

Cheers!
Michael

Michael thanks for telling me that. I did not realize you were playing with the brakes as well. Now I will have to go and look at what you did there. I am going to play around with your new cargo idea as well. So far as I did was change the wieghts to my rolling stock and it made a large difference in the "feel" of the sim.