Setting up a and maintaining a passenger service in OTTD

[Ben1338]

The OTTD wiki has a lot of things, but it doesn't really have any details on how to set up a reliable passenger service, which can help the station ratings.

Traditionally, with industries, I'd have a dual track terminal, such as demonstrated in figure 1.

Where a train to have a train carrying wood to load at a forest, then taking the load to a sawmill to be processed, then returning empty, sounds simple enough, right?

According to http://wiki.openttd.org/Game_mechanics#Station_rating the station ratings depend on "Days since last cargo pickup" as well as "Units of cargo waiting at station".

So, the system that is shown in figure 1 works because when one train is loading, the other one is delivering the load, since 1 train is always loading, the ratings will always stay high and everything is fine.

The problem occurs when a train has to return full, as with connecting 2 towns, passenger and mail travel in both directions, because I'd be inclined to make the trains load at both stations, since they doesn't need to be refitted.

How do you set up and manage a passenger system like this to keep passenger numbers high? Especially in long chain services without using feeder services.

Thanks for reading.

Ben

[FooBar]

It's nearly impossible to always have a train waiting, due to differences in supply at various stations on your route. So the best thing you can do is have trains stopping frequently.

What I often do is set up a line with multiple stations, have at least as many trains as there are stations on the line, and don't set the orders to full load. On a section of track that isn't used by other lines I have a longer bit without signals. This spaces the trains reasonably equally along the line.

[Ben1338]

Alright, and how do you space them? Is there a specific length of time the trains have to wait for?

Spacing has always been a tricky topic since I left the "Timetable based auto-separation patch" patch back in the "OpenTTD Spring 2013 Patchpack v2.0.103 Full" patch pack.

The thing that has always got me, was that if the railway had more then 2 stations along the entire route, it would mean that because of the town's location, the intermediate station(s) would be closer to one end of the line.

The way my method worked, was that there were trains stationed at each platform (1 at the terminals, 2 at the through stations), the stretch between each station was used as a buffer to allow the passenger train to enter it and for the reason above, they were not separated equally as the timetables that were shared by the vehicles were not talking to each other and adjusting the lateness accordingly.

[Alberth]

With a huge number of passengers, you don't need to care about distance, trains will just unload and load to full again, no matter when they arrive.
(That is, with enough passengers, you have a train loading and unloading at every platform, all the time.)


With fewer passengers, the trick mentioned by Foobar of having a stretch of track without signals works very well if you're worried about trains being too close together.

[FooBar]

Alright, and how do you space them?

Like I said, by means of a long track section without signals. Trains have to wait for the previous train to clear the block, so they're spaced automatically. You can also have a single platform that all trains must use and set a long loading time only for that station. How long the signal block or how long the loading time must be is a matter of trial and error.

[Ben1338]

Thank you for the advice.

[Panando]

There is a dastardly trick which can be used to artificially inflate station ratings. I don't know exactly why it works but it has worked since forever. What you do is attach a truck stop and depot to the station, then have a single truck with a single order to go to that station. The truck will simple drive back and forth, and by 'touching' the station so regularly it boosts the station ratings, generally to around 60-70% - even if there is no actual cargo moving service. According to the wiki, if the truck is additionally new, it will provide up to 13% extra points.
In more recent versions, you get warning spam that the truck has invalid orders, without turning off that warning (which is pretty useful to keep on), you can trick the system by giving the truck two orders to go to the station, the second order being 'transfer'. As the truck now has two, non-duplicated orders, the warning system is happy with it. It is dastardly, but if you like you can imagine the truck is actually 'servicing' the station in some sense, like providing intra-station transportation (like busses at large airports).

You can take advantage of this functionality without the dastardly aspect by having a main train station with a truck depot, and a separate truck depot station closer to the industry, where the truck loads at the satellite station and transfers to the main station. It looks pretty reasonable, and will result in far more cargo being delivered by an irregular train service. Certainly the increases in profit dramatically outweigh the expense of the vehicle.

For passengers, especially with cargodist, using buses as part of the passenger chain will automatically give this station boost for regular service. However it will only do anything for smaller cities, once a city is producing say 200+ passengers/month train service can be regular enough that the station ratings will be pretty decent. But in general for low-yield industries and towns, road vehicle feeder services in conjunction with irregular trains are the way to go for maximizing profits.

[Eddi]

i generally have a tram or bus system in a city to keep ratings up.

as for separation, with busses/trams this is done in 3 easy steps:

1. autofill the timetable
2. edit waiting times so one station has long waiting time and the others short, and make sure there is overtaking capacity at that long station.
3. ctrl+click on "start date" to distribute all the vehicles sharing this order equally

with trains, i rarely need that, as there is usually some point in the network that enforces minimal separation (like a terminus entrance). in principle this should work as well, but the timetable probably needs more manual adjustments to balance out hiccups in the network flow.

[Ben1338]

Thanks for the advice, I never thought of using a terminal with a vehicle constantly loading and transferring to keep station ratings up.

Also, I never knew about the control + click on the start button function, I've always used the reset late counter button, which seems to be unreliable.

I know these techniques will come in handy for a LOT of the time, not just for towns, but industries too.

[gazzari]

4 trains, and you only need 1 line between with a crossover halfway and double stations at each end. The traveling trains crossover half way and ideally arrive just before the trains waiting are full. Minimal signals to make sure trains don't go where they should not. You could do it with 2 signals, 1 at each end of the centre crossover.

[Vinnie_nl]

Deal with the problem at the source, how to make a train choose between full load and actually take cargo and go back to first station.

The only easy way I know so far is only possible with NUTS newgrf and usses the flexible max speed of certain train engines. You can make trains choose two ways into a station. Then depending on the way in they follow a full load order or unload and take cargo. the full load path will block itself with waiting trains and combined with some pathfinder mechanics and the set yapf.rail_firstred_twoway_eol 1 setting we can send trains to the other path if it is blocked with 100% reliability.

To do this with vanilla engines or trains that do not have abilities to change max speed I can only think of contraptions that become huge and involve logic gates. explaining that would be difficult even if you understand signals and such.

[Ben1338]

4 trains, and you only need 1 line between with a crossover halfway and double stations at each end. The traveling trains crossover half way and ideally arrive just before the trains waiting are full. Minimal signals to make sure trains don't go where they should not. You could do it with 2 signals, 1 at each end of the centre crossover.

The problem with this method, is that towns aren't where you want them to be, so the alternative to this approach would be just to make it dual track all along, which promotes the growth of the network. as more trains can be introduced when needed.

Deal with the problem at the source, how to make a train choose between full load and actually take cargo and go back to first station.

The only easy way I know so far is only possible with NUTS newgrf and usses the flexible max speed of certain train engines. You can make trains choose two ways into a station. Then depending on the way in they follow a full load order or unload and take cargo. the full load path will block itself with waiting trains and combined with some pathfinder mechanics and the set yapf.rail_firstred_twoway_eol 1 setting we can send trains to the other path if it is blocked with 100% reliability.

To do this with vanilla engines or trains that do not have abilities to change max speed I can only think of contraptions that become huge and involve logic gates. explaining that would be difficult even if you understand signals and such.

Yeah, this method doesn't work for those long commuter trains though, if you have an intermediate station, the trains would gather around the town which produces the least passengers.

The max speed does help when mixing freight with passenger traffic, I have found that local passenger trains can run quite a bit faster then freight since freight doesn't stop at all stations, yet to get the best passenger numbers, it does need to stop at all stations.

Speaking about logic gates, I love logic gates and all of that complicated stuff, I enjoy it most when using programmable signals http://www.tt-forums.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=47690 where you don't have to use tracks to force pre signals to work using a priority-based method and a bunch of additional track.