Gazz292

SimRail is a kind of side project for the guys who's main job is making the professional training simulators used to train real life drivers, It's not like other 'train games' where the company exists purely to make money, and the content they make is dictated by what will sell the best.. hence the tons of uk and German content out there, as that's the biggest market guaranteed to make them millions. A fair bit of the stuff we have in SimRail is from them getting permission to put content in SimRail that was created for train operators paying ?? billions ?? of Złotys for a specific route and rolling stock for their driver training program. To use content from the professional sim is not as simple as dragging a few folders into unity and clicking 'make game' (well, i don't think it is, i could be wrong of course) What works perfectly on the dev's computers often does not work well with home users setups that may be at the budget end of the spectrum, so i imagine a lot of the dev's time is spent getting things to play nicely on a range of computer specs, something that is likely not needed with the professional sim where the finished product includes the computer system it was written for. : I imagine that the software a group of professional devs use to create routes is not going to be very suitable for general home use, firstly that software could need a computer system that will cost 10 grand or more to build, it'd be designed for professionals using pro spec computers, not a home user with a 5+ year old consumer budget pc. Then you will need to learn how to use the software, that's ok if your day job is a software dev / graphics artist etc, but for the general public where some expect to drag and drop a few pre-made sections and click a few buttons to make it all work, it ain't gonna be easy to learn, So the devs need to find time to 'dumb down' the route builder software and make it 'idiot general public proof' which means taking devs off working on other parts of the sim. People have mentioned releasing DLC's when the main sim is not 'finished' is not on.... The cargo pack DLC was made by an outside company, and the reason one of the cargo waggons was missing for a year after release is because it didn't meet the SimRail teams quality standards, so the dev's had to find time to remake it themselves in-between all their other work. i believe the EN57 / Kibble (which was added for free to the main sim) was also from an outside company. The Kraków route extension was made by the main devs (i believe) and was added for free to the main sim. The 1980's route was also made by the main team i believe, again added for free (only to single player, would love it to be available in multiplayer with a full timetable) And the SimRail team have been working on the Lódż extension which will be a DLC, this is only fair, devs are humans who need to earn money to live you know. And then we get to the real issue, everyone wants something different out of SimRail, and the devs have to prioritize things. i personally couldn't care less about a route editor, i've also never spent any time dispatching, nor ever loaded up the TY2 steam loco, i only drive the EU07, EP08, ET22 and EN57 trains as i find modern trains boring, The thing i am eagerly waiting for is the I/O api / sdk, so i can get the lights working on my laptop controllers, then start making a full size replica EU07 driving cab. But i can imagine most people don't want to have their computer desk looking like the cab of a train, let alone build a full size train cab in their house (for some that could be grounds for divorce), so most people are perfectly happy using the keyboard and mouse to drive, as the computer is used for other things. The most important thing with SimRail is to get the core parts of the sim working perfectly before releasing route editors, as how well will it go down if you spend a year working on a route to have a core update that's needed to ... say, get shunting working properly ... break everything you've done so far,

if you use TrackIr, then having the mouse over to the side of the screen where it's out of view means it's still active, if i put the cursor to the bottom right of my screen, every time i move my head a little it pops up the tooltips for the brake lever in the EU07, put it to the top right, and when i move my head enough it will show the tooltip for the sunvisor. Same with the mouse in the top left, put it bottom left and it will show up tooltips for any switch or the radio as the view moves as i move my head to look around as i'm driving. I know i could turn the HUD totally off and not get tooltips showing, but with TrackIr in use, it's very handy to know that you are hovering the mouse over the right switch when you intend to, plus the only other bits of the HUD i have on are the warning messages for speeding, forgetting to change radio channel etc, So having the mouse cursor auto hide when driving, and if possible not have it react to anything it's over if the view moves with TrackIr would be a very very handy feature, then the mouse becomes active again when you deliberately move it, but everyone drives differently in the sim, i'm waiting for the day every switch and control has a keybind (or better a joystick button / axis assignable) then the mouse would be of no use except when in the menu's, or when walking about in the train etc.

I would love to see an occasional service that uses these old coaches on a passenger run, as a sort of emergency replacement train perhaps? A scenario being: the regular train could not be used for some reason, so they ran around the depot looking for any carriages they could to make up the train, but due to the usual standby replacement stock being in use that day, all they had were the old carriages that from a heritage steam service a few days ago. So they used them anyway as an alternative to canceling the service. : Are dynamic train compositions possible, so an alternative of a replacement train made up of older stock being a regular repeated thing, it could be perhaps decided by the 'Ai' after each server restart to pick a random service and substitute it with an alternative.

oh dear, how will the train go around corners now they have deleted the steering wheel 🤪

i used to use a few of the apps that turned my android tablets into external monitors for my laptop, they can be pretty laggy using wifi, getting the USB connection to work was hard but was a bit better, but they ultimately use more resources than simply plugging a proper usb / display port or even VGA/hdmi monitor in... things may be better now we have WIFI6 and even wifi7 in newer computers. But it's a local app i'd really want to see, which would require access to the data on your pc (pretty much the I/O api a few of us are waiting for to enable us to make 'home cockpit' indicator lights. gauges etc work with the sim) So it would be just like the telemetry data from race games, or the SDK we had with Omsi back in 2012 to read out almost any data variable in the sim and control dashboards, ticket machines, IBIS units, destination displays and so on.

oh i bet a lot of people bought the cargo pack DLC after seeing the ET22 thundering past them when driving other trains, or as you say, as a dispatcher see and hear it going past and thinking 'dang that's cool, i want it'

even if it was £/$/€1 for the DLC, there'd still be people complaining it's too expensive 🤑 Having seen the quality of the cargo pack DLC, and the sheer content and quality we get with the base sim, to me what ever price it is will be more than worth it. As for integration, there was talk by a dev on discord a while back of it being on a separate server, but i think we'd switch servers automatically when driving off the edge of the current map and onto the DLC map ... if you don't own the DLC you'd see the tracks and scenery at the edge of the base map, you'd just get kicked to the menu as you do now when you reach the end of the map, but you'd see the other trains coming and going along the tracks to and from from the DLC area i believe, kinda like how if you do not own the cargo pack, you see the ET22 and the freight waggons it comes with, you just can't drive the ET22 which is a much better way to do it than the tsw way, where you need to buy 10 other DLC's just to get some variety in NPC trains... otherwise you see the same dosto repeated all over the entire maps.

i guess this is where the idea of professional and general use servers pops up, Professional servers would be for those who want to 100% pretend they are a real train driver driving a realistic tight timetable and having to follow all the real life rules. General use servers would have slacker timetables and less focus on rules and regulation adherence,

then if you can drag them onto other screens, make an android (or apple if you must ;p) app and have the chat box on your phone, use the phones onscreen keyboard to send replies, then it's like getting text messages on your phone whilst you are dispatching / driving rather than on an imersion breaking box on the main screen.

Whilst waiting at a signal, i got out to go and talk to the workmen the other side of the level crossing, and found they were all almost up to their knees in the mud: Camera location: S: psary_opoczno_terrain_x98_z76, P: (50468.65, 271.35, 39260.04), R: (8.43, 149.24, 0.00)

i actually like that SimRail is doing things more realistically, before the timetable overhaul it was hard to not arrive 20+ minutes early at some stops on the 141xx / 411xx services, Now it's more like real life, you have a tight timetable and once you start to lose time it's hard to make it up, as you begin to lose your time slots along the line. I know in a 'game' people want to get maximum points and be on time every time they play, but treat SimRail as the simulator it is, as if you are driving a real train, delays happen all the time and it's just part of railway life when other peoples actions affect your trip. To me this makes the simulator more exciting as you need to be constantly aware of what's going on around you and think ahead etc, rather than figure out after a few drives that if you put the train on cruise control at xx km/h, you can sit back and watch the scenery go by and you will arrive spot on time, then watch the points / trophies accumulate, then next day do the same until you are bored of everything repeating.

i've noticed the 'nuclear detonation flash' at midnight is a little tamer now it seems. Before it used to be a really short pulse where the screen went totally white and blinded you, now it looks more like a slow lightning flash... or at least it did to me when i just drove a train going past midnight.

This one is an immersion enhancement of sorts... real lights that mimic the cab lights (to an extent) EU07 Cab Light Switches Operating Real Lights .mp4 The video is showing: At 1 second i turn on the 'Oświetlenie Kabin' (Cab Light) switch. The drivers side cab light in the train illuminates, and the the spot lamp to my right turns on at 35% brightness and 3000K colour temp. At 2 seconds i turn on the 'Oświetlenie Ogólne' (Overall Lighting) switch. The left hand cab light in the train illuminates up and the bedside lamp to my left is turned on as well (again at 3000K and 35%) At the 3 second mark i turn on the 'Przyciemnienie Kabiny' (Cab Light Dimmer) switch. This does not have a keybind to dim the cab lights in SimRail unfortunately, but it does dim my room lamps to 1% brightness. At 5 seconds i turn the dimmer switch off, and the room lamps go back to 35% brightness. At 7 seconds i turn the cab light switch off. The right side cab light in the train turns off and the bedside lamp takes a second to fade to off. And at 8 seconds i turn the overall lighting switch off. The left side cab light turns off in the train and the spot lamp to my left fades to off over a second. Why and how i did it: I drive the trains in SimRail mostly at night, so i often have the room lights off to add to the immersion that i am actually driving a train in the dark, but just like a real train driver at night i often want to see my controls for a brief moment, usually to find the correct button to press or switch to move. So like in a real train at night where you would turn on the cab lights to see the controls, i wanted to do similar by switching on and off lamps in my room via the switches on my controllers, at the same time sending the commands to SimRail to operate the cab lights in the train. The process: Fit smart bulbs to the lamps. Put an ESP8266 board in my lighting switch controller with the cab light switches connected to it, that board is running ESPHome. ESPHome sends the switch states via wifi to a Home Assistant server that i have running on an old raspberry Pi (i already had that and use it mostly to view camera feeds from my 3D printer). Home Assistant sends the smart bulb control signals via wifi to the lamps in response to the cab light switches on my controller being operated. The STM32f bluepill board that was already in my controller still sends joystick button signals to the computer, which Joy2Key changes to keyboard presses that SimRail can read (if i was any good at coding i would probably do all this on one board, but these microcontrollers are very cheap and i find it easier to keep input and output stuff separate) Then i had to set up the switch logic and smart bulb settings in Home Assistant. The above took me over a week to figure out and get working, using point and click GUI based programming tools which wrote the code in the background, then programmed the PI and ESP boards wirelessly (that's how ESPHome and Home Assistant works thankfully, as trying to write code fries my brain) As the lamps in the room are also used for general illumination, when i turn the lamps on via their wall switches they illuminate at 4000K colour temperature and 100% brightness. When i turn a cab light in the sim on with a switch on with my controller, the relevant room lamp also turns on at 3000K and either 35% or 1% brightness depending on the position of the cab light dimmer switch.... (i really appreciate the dim position in the dark for preserving night vision) If a lamp is already on at 4000k 100%, it will change to 3000k at the brightness matching the dimmer switch position. Then when a cab light switch is turned off, the cab light in the sim turns off and the relevant room lamp fades out, this is to try and copy how bulbs turn off in SimRail (and i presume real EU07's) ... As they run on DC in the train they take longer to extinguish than AC powered bulbs typically do. The colour temperature thing is to try and mimic the tungsten filament bulbs in the train, so i sort of have a general room illumination mode, and an EU07 cab light mode.

i think it's more like real life now, Before i was always thinking i'd left the cab light on at times as the moonlight was illuminating the cab interior so much, i could see all the forrest clearly around me, and the tracks ahead for miles when i was out in the middle of nowhere a long way from civilization, when in reality it should be pitch black due to there being no artificial lighting in the area (except the trains headlights and carriage lights shining out) The other thing is that... especially in the older trains, their headlights were pretty poor, that's why their reflector housings are the size of 10 gallon buckets, to try and amplify the meagre light you got from tungsten bulbs, A modern LED headlight can be the size of a soup can and illuminate 20 times as much as the old style headlights can, you really notice this when you have a pendolino coming towards you in an EP08.

Still got this issue, it also affects the new 'Train Heating' keybind we got with yesterday's patch. I'm not the only person who has this, asked on discord and someone else tested it in EU07-241 and they found the exact same thing... first press of the key for those switches does not respond, second and all other presses work fine for the rest of the trip in that train. Exit to menu and take another train, and it does the same thing again. I guess most people do not notice this, or think the sim has just not picked up on their key press, and it's easy to re-press a keyboard key to get the switch to move, But as i use 3D printed controls to drive, it means my switch will be in the on position when the one in the sim is still in the off position as a result... and it'll be the same for anyone else building a 'home cockpit' or driving controls. : Would really like to see all keybinds like the earlier ones, where there's 2 keybinds per toggle / rotary switch, i.e. one for on, and another for off. Then the ability to set the same keybind for both the on and off positions for those people who want to do that.

I've just got myself a few 'hall effect potentiometers' thanks to your suggestion before, Quickly connected them to an 'arduino beetle' board: The precision is pretty amazing, the best bit, absolutely no noise or jitter, and these will never wear out like mechanical potentiometers do (the potentiometer in my EU07 train brake lever is wearing out after a year of use) Rather than using a carbon track that a wiper physically moves over as traditional potentiometers use, these use a magnet on the shaft, and hall effect sensors read the magnetic flux as the magnet and shaft rotates to determine the position... so no contact at all and nothing to wear out and produce noise that results in the signal jumping. The ones i got have no end stops, the reading simply goes up to 980, then changes to 40 as you rotate it past the 'end' (they do not read 0 to 1023 like mechanical pots do, but that is easy to account for if you really do need zero or 1023 in arduino's with the mapping function) . These hall effect potentiometers come in different styles, i got some 360 degrees ones, but if you are only going to move the potentiometer say 180 or 90 degrees, you can get ones that have that amount of rotation, this will give you the full resolution over that smaller angle... i.e. the full 40 to 980 for 10 bit ADC reading, unlike regular potentiometers which reduce the resolution if you restrict their movement... i.e. you'd get say 0 to 250 if you only moved a traditional potentiometer 90 degrees, so there's no need to use big gear ratios anymore to ensure the potentiometer moves the full amount. The other thing to be aware of is their operating voltage, i got 5 volt ones that do not work on 3.3 volts that STM and ESP boards use, but it's easy to take 5 volts from the USB pins on those boards and use the input pins that are 5v tolerant, or use a level shifter.

I think i might have made all the 'controllers' i need to drive the EU07 / EP08 style trains at my laptop desk now, it's only taken me 2 years : Gone is the radmor style 3D printed USB microphone that sat in it's holder on the side of the lighting switch panel (and the tacky 6 key plus rotary encoder mini keyboard i used to change radio channel and press the ZEW buttons) 😊 I now have a 3D printed Radmore style radio 😊 As with all the items on my laptop driving desk, the radio is sized to fit the space i have, i reckon it's about 3/4 of real size, i also deliberately reduced the height of the radio's main case as i needed the radio to pass over my legs when i move the overbed table out of the way, yet still hang off the front of table dovetail mounts so the top is below the main switch panel. The radio is made up of individual panels that screw together to make the main case, the case is then screwed to the switch panel from below, with the push button mounting piece screwed through the top of the switch panel, a 1mm thick 'text plate' fits over the buttons and hides the screws (which is handy as it took 2 hours to print the text plate alone, and i printed about 10 of them before i got one as good as i could get it, thank bod the 3D printer does the work and not me) A dovetail mount screws to the rear of the radio, allowing the radio to slide onto the mounts on my table like any of my other controllers. A base panel that houses the microphone board screws to the bottom of the main case, the microphone is a seperate item that's a little smaller than my self contained USB mic (to match the scale of this radio) this mic only houses a mic element and a switch, a coiled 4 pin headset cable connects the mic element and PTT switch to the microphone board (the switch goes to the STM button board) The microphone board is the circuit board out of a cheap desktop 'streamers echo mic' ... shown as i bought it to the left. This 'streamers mic' has a soundcard built in, so it can play audio from the computer via a set of headphones plugged in the 3.5mm socket, This could be handy if it ever becomes possible to route the radio's audio to a seperate speaker in SimRail (like some games can route the VOIP chat audio to a headset whilst playing the main game sounds via the main computer speakers) This mic also has a 'monitor' function where it can play the audio from the mic over a headset, so my radio's speaker is plugged into the mic board for this reason, allowing me to check i have not set the echo control too high or i'm getting feedback.... Feedback was an issue i had when using the monitor function when the mic was sat in it's holder, as this places the mic very close to the speaker, so to get around this i routed one of the mic element wires through the (double pole) PTT switch so the mic is only live when the PTT switch is pressed, this is how it's done in a lot of 2 way radio mics... it also means my mic is always muted when i am not deliberately pressing the PTT button, so google is not able to listen for advertising keywords either. The mic board plugs into a USB port, as does the STM microcontroller board used for the buttons and switches, so i used a USB C bulkhead fitting (gives you a USB C female socket on either side of a panel) into which a 3 port USB hub plugs inside the radio, then the mic and STM boards plug into that hub using short cables, leaving me one USB port for another board in the future to run the LED's properly. I used 3 x 12 position single pole, 30 degree per position rotary switches, one with the lock out washer / position restrictor set at 10 positions for the channel change switch, one at 6 positions for the volume switch, and 3 positions for the 'Nazłuch' switch, Only the channel change switch has keybinds to do anything in the sim, you can move the other 2 knobs with the mouse, the volume one adjusts the radio speaker's volume.... i've never actually tried doing this when someone is talking in MP. And the Nasłuch switch i think selects which ZEW tone the radio will respond to when you have the radio in 'Do Not Disturb' mode (where you put the microphone in the holder backwards, so the ring around the mouthpiece presses on 2 metal pins, the radio will then be silent except for one transmision after someone presses a ZEW button on their radio, something that is not simulated in SimRail as the ZEW tones do not play over other peoples radios) The push button switches are 'piano switches' that are commonly used in real radio's. Usually these come as multiple switches in a row fixed on a long metal mounting piece, with an 'interlock' function, so only one button locks down at once and pressing another button releases the last one... as found in 1980's era hifi equipment for source selectors etc. I don't need the interlock function for the radio's switches, and you can remove the interlock bar and make the switches independent, but i also needed to set each switches spacing differently to how the ones i got are on the single piece mount, you can get different switch spacings, but i found it easier to just get individual piano switches, rotate them 90 degrees and make a 3D printed mount for them... but that does increase the distance needed between the piano switches and rotary switches. I also need some latching versions of these piano switches, as that's what is used for the power, squelch / noise block and radiostop buttons, for the ZEW buttons i need momentary switches, but thankfully these are old skool switches that allow modding, and you can pull the little wire piece out that provides the latching function to turn them onto momentary switches... some of these switches need the end under the spring in place to stop the switch springing all the way out, so cut the latch wire in half and place just the top (dog leg) part back under the spring. The the brain of the radio is a STM32F microcontroller board running FreeJoy that i've used a few times before in other switch panels, the hope is one day we will get joystick support for SimRail and then the sim can read the joystick buttons directly (and hopefully also joystick axes for the levers) But for now i use JoyToKey running on my laptop when SimRail is running to change the joystick buttons to keyboard key presses. I used 29 of the 30 pins on the STM board for rotary switch and push button inputs, the final 'spare pin' i connected to the red 'SFN' led which lights up when i press the push to talk button on the microphone as shown below: That red SFN led should also light up when the ZEW and radiostop buttons are pressed i believe .... to show it's transmitting, i hoped to do that with FreeJoy, but it turns out i can only set it to turn the led on from one input (the piano switches are multi pole ones, so i could re-wire things to get the SFN led lighting up when the ZEW and radiostop buttons are pressed too, not that they do anything in multiplayer mode in the sim, i imagine the ZEW tones are not played to everyone's radio in range because of trolls who would press them all the time to annoy people, same as why the radiostop only works in your own train if you press it) I connected the green power led to the power switch, so it simply turns on and off as i use that switch, In the future when we get the I/O API in the sim, i will add a second microcontroller board to run the led's, then i can have the power led turn off if the loco's battery is off, or the radmor power supply / cab selector is off or set to the wrong cab, and maybe even have the SFN light only work (or illuminate dimly) if there's someone in range... kinda how the mic icon next to the text chat box will only go green when someone is in range to hear you .. so i know not to bother hyping myself up to talk on the radio when there's no point (i have issues talking on phones, the radio is easier as i'm in control with the PTT button, but i still don't use it much because of my 'issues') : Finally... a view of the top of the radio, the tamper seal on the radiostop button is a 3D printed distressed 'seal tag' and a few strands of thin electrical wire for the break wire, i heated the ends of the wire to melt it into the seal tag. The radiostop buttons surround screw posts are 2.8mm diameter with a 1mm hole in the sides of them for the tamper wire to pass through, i was struggling to fit that stuff together even using tweezers and a magnifier. And really finally this time (i've spent 3+ hours typing this wall of text!) The radio from the front with the mic sat in its cradle, as it spends 99% of it's time when i'm driving a train. i used flash for these photo's so it shows up every little imperfection of the 3D printed parts that you don't usually notice with your eyes in normal light.

Just noticed that the Czuwak test no longer sounds the buzzer like it used to... it flashes the light and applies the brakes, Is the buzzer thing not supposed to sound during the test? This was in EP08-008 and EN71-005 that i drove tonight.

Oh yes, i love every bit of immersion i can get, and i love hearing about how things work IRL and in the sim, thankyou for the info on how the Radiostop test feature works. It was due to me making a 3D printed (~3/4 size) radmor style radio recently that i found out about the channel 10 radio stop test thing when looking at video's of how the buttons worked (i thought at first the ZEW buttons were latching ones due to the animation in SimRail that pushes then releases them with a click and a clack sound when you press the relevant keybinds, rather than holding them down for as long as the keybind is held for) I know i've got the red and green led's the wrong way round on my radio, i'm waiting for some new ones in the post that are the correct old style diffused ones and i'll change them over, then add this part of my 3D printed laptop driving desk to the post about SimRail hardware we've built. It would be cool to have the extra immersion detail of the radio stop test only working near a depot, i thought it was a feature built into the radio's, but it makes even more sense for it to be something that sends the radio stop signal back to you on channel 10 in a depot as that's testing all of the radio system and not just the parts internal to the train. I had noticed that holding down the cuzwak pedal or SHP button for a few seconds got the lights to flash, then the buzzer then the brake application, i thought that was more to show up a stuck pedal / button, but it's another real life test in SimRail😍. Now i will do that test after taking over a train in multiplayer as well as the rolling brake test i do sometimes,

The radiostop test function is replicated: With the Radmor radio: Put it on channel 10 then press and release ZEW 3, then ZEW 1, The radiostop tones start and air pressure is released in your loco only. Turn the radio off and back on to reset the brake valve, then hold the brake releaser button until brake pressure is back to normal. With the Koliber radio you select channel 0, display will show 'RadioStop' Press and release ZEW 3 then ZEW 1 and the same thing happens. Again, radio off and back on to reset the brake valve etc. . . Not much use really as the radiostop button only triggers the brakes in your own train to prevent trolling, so it's kind of the same thing, but i thought it was cool that this kind of thing is in the sim, maybe one day it will be part of the procedures when starting a loco cold in single player, some scenarios' have brake tests included now so i can imagine this being yet another layer of realism.

The texture for the rocker switch part of the inline light switch for the timetable light in EP08-008 is black when it's in the off position, correct texture shows when the switch is turned on.

Hopefully i've got the labels spelled correctly this time: I mix up letters in english words all the time, but the computer usually corrects them for me, i have a uk keyboard, so i get the Polish letters by using 'PowerToys Quick Accent', but spelling the labels correctly is purely down to me copying them down properly, and mixing letters up does not help when i can't even pronounce half the words 😵‍💫

The catenary wires can also ice up inside the Centralna tunnels and station i found out tonight. Kinda cool to see the arcing from the pantograph illuminating the tunnel roof and walls, but i imagine this is not supposed to happen, especially not in the station section where it should be warm enough so ice won't form on the wires.

Thankyou for pointing that out. it took me a while to even spot which letters i'd transposed, but eventually i found i'd got the K and Z near the end mixed up.

Soon after i started making controllers for my laptop table, i wanted to have the timetables displayed next to my laptop's screen so i can drive with the HUD turned off. Of course simply printing the timetables out was too easy, so i chose to display them electronically using an e-ink display, Why an e-ink display? using a device with a screen that uses a backlight is not great when driving at night for showing a white paper timetable, it's like shining a torch in your eyes unless you use dark mode, and that destroys the illusion of there being a paper timetable present i think. At first i tried to use an old kindle paperwhite but i soon gave up with it, it had poor resolution, was a pain to send it .pdf files and display them how i wanted, let alone sort them in folders by advancing service number. And the biggest problem... i wanted to mount it upside down, but after a forced update the 180° screen rotation option was removed, that update also removed the option to turn the frontlight totally off as well 🤬 So i chose to use a 6 inch 'Kobo Clara HD' black and white e-ink reader instead, i run the open source 'KOReader' on the Kobo which does all sorts of things like easy drag and drop .pdf files in folders with the sorting you want, and it has a great reflow feature to easily alter the size of everything on the screen to make the timetables fill the screen perfectly, Thankfully to get KOReader running on the Kobo was as easy as dragging and dropping a file to it when connected to USB, something i can just about manage to do 😊 I mounted the Kobo in a cheap universal phone holder that positioned it to the right of my laptops screen, behind my 3D printed train brake valve, in sort of the position it would be in the EU07: Then i started to make my own timetables in excel just before SimRail.express released their timetables that are shown in the cabs of the trains in the sim. I really struggle at this sort of thing, but thankfully my dad used to use excel every day and helped me a lot, and i eventually managed to make a few sets of timetables for the trains i drive the most. I made my own versions of the timetables for 2 reasons, the main one being so i could size everything to fit on the small 6 inch screen and still be readable, to do this i did not include the repeated columns on the right hand side that show the trains weight, length, brake % etc (i show this once on the front page of each timetable instead) I also display it as if the timetable paper has been folded in half, again due to screen size, i just tap the right or left side of the Kobo's screen to display the next or previous page in the timetable, and tapping at the top of the screen allows me to access the main folder to select the timetable for the service i am driving. And the second reason for making my own version of the timetables, i wanted to included the temporary speed limits that are not shown on real timetables (they would be shown on a seperate paper, as IRL they change quite often) I added the temporary speed limits because i have memory issues, and i just can not memorise the route and speed limit locations even after 2 years of playing SimRail. : So that's how i displayed the timetables when driving in the sim for well over a year, but all along i had an idea to make the Kobo look like it was a piece of paper on a timetable stand in the cab of the train. Over the last few months i'd been playing about designing a 3D printed case to house the screen from the Kobo, so it looks like the timetable stand found in Polish loco's with a cutout for the screen to show through as if it was a page of a paper timetable sitting on the stand. Unfortunately the screen is larger than the cutout, and has electronics on the sides and top, so it has to sit behind the front panel and will always look like a screen behind a hole in a piece of plastic, but if you squint your eyes it can almost look as i hoped it would: I'd already made a slightly larger version of my wiper control panel to include room for the timetable light cable gland. The wire from the gland to the light is a white headphone cable, the 3.5mm stereo jack plug is hidden inside the 3D printed cable gland, with a panel mount 3.5mm socket mounted in the wiper switch panel, so i can unplug the cable if needed. The inline switch housing is again 3D printed... my laptop controllers are about half the size of the real things, so an off the shelf inline switch would be way out of scale, the actual rocker switch in the inline housing measures just 15mm x 8mm The ebay listing had lots of feedback from people moaning they are a lot smaller than they thought, one even said it melted when they used it to switch 50 watt bulb!! 🤯 But it was the perfect size for my needs, and is only switching half a watt at 5 volts. And of course the timetable illumination light works: For now all i've done is take power from the arduino inside the wiper switch panel, +5v runs up one wire in the cable to the switch, which interrupts the power when off, and when the switch is turned on it sends the +5v to a 75mm length of warm white COB LED tape that's fixed inside the lamp shade, the return from the LEDs goes down another of the wires to ground. But i also connected the 3rd wire in the headphone cable to the switched terminal of the switch, so later on i can connect that wire to an input pin on the wiper panels arduino, Then this can turn the timetable light in the sim on and off with my real switch (if we get a keybind for the timetable light that is) I will also then connect the ground wire via a mosfet to an arduino output pin, and when we have the I/O system i can have the timetable light turn off with all the other lights if the loco's battery is turned off and stuff like that... for once in my life i'm actually thinking ahead 😮 . You may have noticed the train number on the timetable in last 2 pictures says 14143, i have yet to update them for the timetable update we got a few months ago, the important info is there like the positions of the speed limits and stations, but of course the times are off due to tightening up of the schedules etc, and the service numbers have changed to reflect that SimRail now shows the actual start and end stations for the whole timetable as it is done IRL. But i've forgotten how i made the timetables in excel, so need my dad's help again to change them.