Could I, please, pick your brains on the correct use of signals for parallel, interconnected rail lines?

[edward3]

Good morning, everybody.

I was a casual player of Transport Tycoon that has just found the Open TTD a few weeks ago.
I am giving it a go and there is an issue that I don't seem to be able to solve by trial and error.
I love building 7 platforms stations and running parallel lines between them, connecting them every 13 to 15 tiles and 1 tile away from the stations, like in the attached example save game. I usually use two ways path signals before and after the junctions, which works perfectly at the stations and mostly OK for the junctions until about 11 trains, when I get two trains coming from opposite directions, on the same line and stopping at the junction facing each other, without thinking of taking the free left or right line to cross and continue on their way.
Could I please get some help on choosing the right signals for the junctions or having the trains use 3 lines in one direction and 4 in the other, like some people do in YouTube tutorials, but with only one lane one way and another the opposite.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Have a beautiful weekend!
Edward.

[Alberth]

The waiting is an inevitable side-effect of trying to distribute traffic over the available lines. At each junction a decision is made where to go next, and for that it needs to compute the next track with the least amount of traffic on it.
(That is, it considers many more options to get to the other station than you think.)

Since your trains are quite evenly spread over all tracks, there is no clear winner, and making a decision is worse than waiting a little longer, apparently.


In general, multi-directional track is horrible. Even if you manage to get it working, the performance will be horrible. Basically you are giving the trains too much freedom, so they generally just move in random fashion which is a lot slower than if you add some directions how to behave.

This is for example why we have a directive saying to drive at the left or right of the way (depending on your country). It makes that cars can drive faster and safer.

For your trains, try to limit two-way tracks to a minimum, and use one-way path signals to give trains directions, organizing the traffic at the railways a little more.
Enjoy further experiments!

[Drury]

When you enable showing reserved paths, you can see that sometimes trains reserve multiple paths for themselves, by i.e. starting at the leftmost track, then shifting one track right on the first intersection, then one track further right on the next one. This means that all three tracks are now taken up by one train, i.e. in your case almost half of them.

I wouldn't know how to make this kind of layout work efficiently short of burning it to the ground and building a one-way system.

[edward3]

Thank you for your reply.
I understand that one way tracks are more efficient and, I assume, with correctly position one way path signals I can solve the rail lines problems. But, then, how do I direct the train to leave the station on the correct tracks? If the trains come through the right most 3 how will they know to leave through the left most 4?

[Drury]

A train is physically incapable of passing a one-way signal the wrong way even if its stupidity tries really hard to convince it otherwise.