Judging capacity

[Baldy's Boss]

How many trains can a given length of track be expected to support without undue problems,and to what extend may this scale with their speed?
Obviously one breakdown-prone train can hold up a dozen others,but within reasonable operating parameters is there a rule of thumb?
In L.O.W.RR,my main income producers are the trains on the lines along the northeast coast,but I worry that I may be overcrowding them.
There are backlogs at some stations,and usually room on the platforms to lengthen the trains.
Advice is appreciated...

[Alberth]

Assuming you have no deadlocks in the track, track length is irrelevant.

Full capacity means you have a train loading or unloading at every platform at every station, all the time. It's very hard to achieve this, usually some platforms or even entire stations can be empty some of the time.

However, that is the goal to steer towards. When a train is leaving a platform, another train should be arrive at exactly that moment to take its place. You don't want to have waiting trains, as waiting means not moving and not not loading and not unloading, ie wasted time.
Just as with keeping platforms occupied, this is hard to achieve, in particular in the presence of breakdowns. More likely, the next train should generally arrive a little early, and wait a short time before the currently loading train has left. Having a long queue of trains is however not useful, you're not moving more cargo, it just takes longer for everything to arrive at their destination.


The answer to your question is thus, you need to fix your tracks if trains are queueing or blocked, and you need more trains if stations or platforms are empty for long periods of time.

Whether you need more or less trains per length unit of track depends on speed and loading/unloading time. Time required by one train loading/unloading is used by the next train to arrive at the station. If you load/unload fast, or if the top speed of the next train is low, you need more trains (the next train won't move much before the train at the platform leaves). With long load/unload times and fast trains, you need less trains.

[Baldy's Boss]

So I spent the next year mainly adding trains to lines with crowded platforms...revenues went up,but a lot of that was spent on those new trained.And there are definitely areas of stop-and-go traffic.

[Baldy's Boss]

There are definite areas of stop-and-go,not sure if any individual train reliability is causing it.(Lately seeing this on the track from Breestable to Bandown Castle).
Before long the trains may be replaced by Eurostars,a substantial speed boost...what affect would this have on the capacity issue?
The northeast coast lines remain top earners,I'm just trying to keep them optimized.

[Baldy's Boss]

Still hoping for some advice on this!!

The traffic has been consistently clogging on the northwestward line toward Bandown Castle and not on the return journey.
I dual-tracked that direction past Muburgh (not a station) and added a third passenger platform at Bandown Castle,landscaping as needed.
I still find "traffic jams",now in parallel,and multiple trains are often found in the Bandown Castle depot waiting to enter the station...just about
every train emerging from the double-tracked section goes in there,while the new depot I built at Muburgh just before the split seems to go
unused.

What is necessary to get the flow moving faster?

[Alberth]

Well, here's your problem:

bottleneck.png (616.57 KiB) Viewed 1431 times

Look at the front of where trains are stuck, and discover what they are waiting for.

In this case, each train must move into the depot, and then out again, and the next train can't move into the depot until the previous one is fully out.
Making a double depot helps, but not enough:

bottleneck2.png (242.67 KiB) Viewed 1431 times

Notice how the train in the middle has no loading symbol? It means it wants to leave, but another train is blocking the path.
If you watch this for a while (eg check the length of the queue, pick a train that leaves, and when it returns at the end of the queue, check the length of the queue again), you will see the queue is stable, and doesn't disappear.

Time to ask the city to donate a few tiles, I think
Making it roro solves the returning traffic problem, and if you add another platform it will probably work. I played a little longer with your setup, and ended with:

bottleneck3.png (412.46 KiB) Viewed 153 times

Extending the double line all the way through to the platforms, so you have 2 feeds to the platform (your trains are awfully slow). Add a retour loop, as some silly trains wanted to go back to the platforms after having left. Make sure that a train there does not block the outgoing track for other trains!
Also deleted the signal at the top right, so both trains wait before the first junction and thus can use all 3 platforms all the time.

[Baldy's Boss]

Looks like going RoRo solved the crowding there (I hated tearing down that hotel,but I suppose the days of transit saved by the arriving trains are nights people meeting passengers in Bandown Castle don't have to spend in the hotel waiting for them).
I didn't add all the depots you did.

There are still huge backlogs at the other ends of the lines that converge there (Lewisminster North and Breestable Woods) and they're in city-center locations that can't be easily Ro-Roed.
Any fixes there?

[Alberth]

Both stations are practically empty, trains seem mostly stuck along the way, it seems to me.

[Ivir Baggins]

Both stations are practically empty, trains seem mostly stuck along the way, it seems to me.

Check the trains going into the stations. What's their problem?

[Baldy's Boss]

The RoRo conversion at Bandown Castle seems to have made room for more trains.
I've added a third platform at Lewisminster North and am in the process at Breestable Woods (replacing office buildings as sites open up).and have added a new high-capacity train to each line.
Note the greatly improved financial results for 2005 over 2004!