Oldlimey wrote:Hi all,
I don’t know if this works as I haven’t tried it myself, but this is a note I made when Portals were being discussed on the Uktrainsim forum some time ago:
Create a consist in front of the Portal, and give the consist a start time, destination etc just as for any other AI train.
Double click on the Portal’s central post to open up the properties window.
Click on ‘Add’, then click on the consist.
The consist should disappear from view, and be added to the Portal and then it should be expelled at the time you set for it when setting up the consist.
As I said, I haven’t tried this one out yet, but it might be worth a try!
Regards Ted.
At the risk of being slammed around a bit, I will say that I did use portals as AI origin points in several scenarios I created for one of the RS versions of the PO&N. They worked most of the time, but were not completely reliable. I gave up the stunt eventually, not so much on the basis of inconsistent performance as for the difficulty of retreiving the trains from the portal when I wanted to edit them for some reason.
One more comment about AI traffic in general: I've found it useful to start by placing just an engine and working with that until it does what I want it to do--well, at least more or less and most of the time. Then I add cars in bunches of 10 or so, testing after each addition, since if the length of an AI train exceeds the length of the shortest signal block it should pass through (on any path the dispatcher may choose), there's trouble ahead. If I reach a point at which the AI train fails, I try shortening it and that sometimes works, but deleting the whole thing and starting over is sometimes the only cure.
Old Prof
