Instructions for activity construction in the OR

[213 001-1]

Dear railway friends!

Are there any instructions for building activities in the OR? I'm asking because I've heard that there are some differences in building activities in the OR compared to the MSTS.

Thank you in advance for your answers.

[wwhall]

First and foremost, understand that the Activity Editor in TSRE is incomplete, with some "buggy" parts that will cause you trouble if you don't understand them. On that latter point, I could write a 3 page response that wouldn't cover all of them. Does that mean that you should not use it? No, because the TSRE AE will do things that the MSTS AE can not, and there are some things that it can do better than the MSTS AE.

Here is some short advice to get you at least started:

1. Use the OpenRails TrackViewer to build all of the paths needed for your activity before you ever start to build the activity in the TSRE AE. TSRE, at this point, has no path editor.
2. Have all of the consists that you need for the activity (including loose consists) built before building the activity in the TSRE AE. I use the TSRE Consist Editor for this. There are some workarounds for this, but, especially for novices, it's just easier to have the consists pre-built.

I will leave a lot of the other tricks and workarounds to others to advise about (and there a plenty that are necessary). One final note: there are some things that the TSRE AE simply will not do, and must be accomplished by opening the .act file in a text editor--I prefer using Context for this. And, DO NOT bounce back and forth between editing the activity in the MSTS AE and the TSRE AE. Saving an activity that has been saved in the TSRE AE in the MSTS AE can actually wipe out things in the .act file that the TSRE AE put there. And, yes, trying to run an activity built in the TSRE AE may crash MSTS if one tries to run it in MSTS.

[213 001-1]

Thank You for Your informations. My question relates primarily to the design of train crossings or train overtaking. What I mean by that is that the player train has to wait for an oncoming train in a station on a single-track line, for example. Or the player train has to wait in a station to be overtaken by a faster train.

I read some time ago that in OR you don't use blind trains to "hold up" the player train. Instead, the waiting points known from the MSTS should be used for this purpose.

If that's true, I'd be interested to know how these waiting points are used for this purpose?

[wwhall]

Read the OpenRails manual available on the OpenRails website. It has a full discussion on meets, waiting points, etc. and how they can be used. The waiting points in OR have much more functionality than those used in MSTS. As a word of warning, OR waiting point data is one thing that the MSTS AE will overwrite if one saves an activity in MSTS. Also, passing paths function differently than they do in MSTS. That is also discussed in the OpenRails manual.