Gazz292

Apologies in advance for the length and detail in the following post, please only read it if you have a free half hour to get to the end, or can't sleep 🥱🙂 I've been spending almost every free hour over the last 2+ weeks learning how to use excel... gotta remember that maths, formulas and code are not my strong points, but i am learning and having fun doing so. I was (still am) getting confused with the speed limits and how to work out which line they apply to (Vp or VL, N or P track etc) this seems to change depending on which way you are driving the route but also which part of the route you are on (relates to where that particular line starts and ends to which direction you are driving on it) Things were going well until i noticed some of the 'Track Speed Limits' posted in the 'Community-made content' forum are not matching with RWag78's ones, i think that's something to do with the disclaimer on the Track Speed Limits post that says 'The list does NOT include permanent and temporary speed limits (W9 and W14 signs)' But i need the speed limit start distance to 3 decimal points, as that's how it's shown in a real drivers timetable, and i also need to show all speed limits that would be shown on the HUD in SimRail (except signaled ones, like 40 Km/h due to a S12 signal) The idea of realistic drivers timetables is to enable us to drive HUD'less. So i need to combine RWag78's data with other data to get my desired result. DeadlyKungFuNinja has been helping me with his data from the EDR dispatchers timetable screen project too. : I also keep getting distracted, going off to work on things like a Touch Portal screen to give me my most used Excel functions at my fingertips (using a mouse too much is painful for me) so i've been making button icons for that : Anyway, back to this project, which is to make PDF timetables in the form of individual books for each service that will display properly on a 6 inch e-ink device like a kindle / kobo etc, They will also scale to fit on a tablet i've found, but my main focus is to make the timetables arranged and sized correctly to show as single pages on kindles / kobo's etc. Above is my kobo showing 14133's timetable front page, and a 10 inch android tablet showing the 2nd page, both PDF files are the same. Tablets can scale things with ease, kindles can't, and you don't want to be in zoom and move mode when trying to flip to the next timetable page when driving your train, or losing valuable screen space with empty space at the sides or top. Things were getting a bit complicated and overwhelming, so to relax a little i decided to have a little play about with the front cover generator part of the project... The left hand side is the generated drivers timetable front cover / first page, and the right hand side is the excel 'magic' bits, The italic text in the boxes is text that stays the same (i translated it to english as i can't read Polish without a translator, but the actual timetable pages will be in Polish, as SimRail is about driving Polish trains) So the items in bold are the bits that change, mostly using random date and number generators, dates are chosen between 1/1/16 and 31/12/18 to hopefully reflect a timetable generated during the time period we drive in SimRail ~ 2018. The dates, days and order numbers change every time i recalculate anything in excel. Please tell me if i have things wrong, and if the 'ZPIRJ_' is the name / code of the person who authorised the timetable to be created? should this be a random thing too, like the order number is? And SKRJ, that's the official service that generates real timetables, maybe that should be changed? as i am not using their system of course, it's all my computer, excel and my brain making this stuff up.... what i don't want to happen is in ~5 years time people searching google for real drivers schedules finding these and thinking they are official ones to add to their collection. : So, onto the actual timetable, below is the 2nd page of the timetable for service 14125, the actual info needed to drive HUD'less, The select train number, and offset time bits on the right is the excel stuff that automatically adjusts the time in the timetables to suit the train number, it also changes what's placed as the title at the top of each page and on the front cover etc, the (12345) would be the internal train designation, no idea how to work that out yet. And finally, a shot of the part of the excel table thing that does most of the work: On the right is WRag78's timetable, middle is the data about the train and the train numbers and offset times (an Xlookup thing searches those) And on the left is the data for the 14100 services, Where the speed limit Km column has 3 digits after the decimal point, that's info i've got from the 'Track Speed Limits' post, but as you can see they sometimes don't match with Wrag78's timetable data, so i've stopped halfway down whilst i try to find the info i need on SimRails full speed limits and locations, I am also using a real timetable i found on google that covers part of the main SimRail route, but it's from 2020 (SimRail is set in 2018) and its an ED250 200 kmh service, and i'm currently working on the EP07 125 kmh services. I'll stop waffeling now and get back to playing in excel, thakyou for reading this far.

i'm one of those who hates voice comms (i haven't made a telephone call in over 5 years... if i can't do it by text / eMail etc, i can't do it... yet i used to be into CB radio as a teenager) Maybe a way to activate the chat window as we do now with a keybind, but then if we press another key it pops up a list of messages, and we just move through them with the arrow keys and press enter twice to send that message.. or click on them with the mouse (then after sending the message, it exits the chat and gives us control back to drive the train, need to send another message, press the chat keybind, or click the chat box with the mouse again)

it's people like me clogging the thread up with ideas then posts about my personal project based on this data. Maybe the 'community made content' pages of the forums could be made into a single post per item, and it's the description and links to download the created content, i.e the first post here. and the author updates that single post with the latest versions, and can add extra info etc, but keeping it on simple post per project. Then a link takes you off to a seperate page which is for discussing things, and that one can get messy like i've made this one with all my waffle, but it doesn't affect people who just want to download something and try it out, who st the moment have to read through 3 pages to find the latest download link?

that's kind of where i'm getting confused... flipping the distances around for when traveling the opposite direction, So the 'To km' on the P track (red numbers on left) becomes the 'From Km' on the N track (red numbers on right) and vice versa with the N to P track .....i think:

got you, or 'understood' 🙂

gotya,

Do any of the above resources tell us the time of departures to the second tho? not just to the minute as SimRail shows it?

Awesome, you'd outdone yourself again, 🤩 About all is missing now is the train weight, brake % and brake setting... but that kind of stuff isn't really of use to the average player, as the train will be set up for them when they teleport into it. That kind of info is more of use to people who want realistic looking drivers schedules, but for the 'average' player they would be way OTT, especially as they are not as easy to read as your line by line timetables are. Same as a real timetable has the distances shown to 3 decimal points, way OTT when the sim shows everything to 1 decimal point, and the hectometer boards are in 1 decimal point 200 meters apart, so it's not as if we need to know that a new speed limit starts at 298,754 km, just be doing the new limit by the 298.7 / 298,6 hectometer board and you'll be fine. : Oh yeah, one bit of info that would be nice to know would be the exact times the train departs a station, as it's not say 16:47:00, it'll be more like 16:47:42, (which on a real timetable is shown in decimal seconds, so that time would be shown as on the drivers timetable. But SimRail does not show the time in seconds on the F1 timetable, nor on the upper right corner departure time display... you only know when the time turns 16:47 and your 'time to departure' countdown timer is still showing 42 seconds left to go.... which is the biggest issue with driving HUD 'less, you don't know the exact time your are scheduled to leave at.

I know english is the official language used for air traffic and ships, but wouldn't a Polish railway do everything in Polish? therefore instead of learning english, we should all learn some Polish train related phrases? 🤯 I know there are some countries that speak english (or their version of it) and they won't entertain the idea that the rest of the world speaks different languages, i've seen people complaining that the switch labels in the trains have not been translated into english!! why bother with a Polish railway simulator if you don't want to pretend you are driving a real Polish train through Poland? Bugs me when i hear station announcements in a mix of english and Polish... so i swapped over the language file for the station announcements so i hear them all in Polish, as if i was actually in Poland driving one of their trains.

Thankyou so much for this, it is very useful, Just to clarify, temporary limits like at that bridge which has a temporary 120 Km/h limit under it (on line 1 i think, the 200 km/h line) won't be shown in this data? Is that because this kind of thing can change depending on the date in SimRail? so a temporary speed limit that is present in august may not be there in october. ::::::::::::::::: I'm confused at the 'not including permanent speed limits' bit, are those temporary limits that have been made permanent? So, a speed limit that may be shown with a W27a sign, that's a track limit and is in this data: And so are the speed changes that happen when you change track or go over points etc. But permanent speed limits announced by a W8 sign, and marked by the W9 signs are not in this data? Neither are temporary speed limits announced by a D6 sign, and marked by W14 signs?,

oh bugger, sorry, ment to type 'buttons.conf' but my brain was thinking 'settings' sorry for the confusion.

if only it were that simple. AFAIK the devs need to enable the key binds, i've been trying for the past few months to add extra key binds using all names i can think of for switches in the settings.conf file, none have worked.

i believe there is one universal camera height across all trains, would love to be proven wrong tho, about 2 updates ago they altered the view when using TrackIr because someone said it was a bit low in one of the trains, and they had to look down then reset the trackir view to compensate, but after that change, i find the view is a bit too high in all the other trains, and i have to look up then reset the trackir view to get back the 'normal view' especially in the EU07.

The devs are working on realistic timetables so that will help a lot,

thats the light pattern for running on the opposite line (which i can see here that train is not on)

There is a clock in the EU07... it's an analog clock in the Hassler tachometer, ok you need to zoom in a fair bit to read the time on it, but it does work! As people are noticing, trains don't often depart on the minute, as shown in a portion of a real drivers schedule / timetable below... some stops can be as little as 20 seconds in real life.. that's when running on time: The column with 2 rows after the arrival and departure time is the time allowed to travel between sections / posts, upper one is when running on time, lower one is when running late. You'll notice these times have their last digit in superscript (halfway above normal text) that is decimal seconds, where : 1 Decimal second = 6 normal / UTC seconds.......... 2=12, 3=18, 4=24, 5=30, 6=36, 7=42, 8=48, 9=54 (no need for 10 decimal seconds to be shown, that's shown as no superscript number as in the time to arrive at the stop above) so it's a Base10 system.. mixed with a Base60 system. But as mentioned in a post above, if you look at the time to depart part of the HUD when you are in a station, it'll tell you that you have say 50 seconds left before departure, but the timetable panel says you depart at 18:25. as it doesn't show seconds.

personally, i find it more annoying the people who have no avatar, or set the question mark one deliberately, sometimes i see 3 or 4 train moving around the map with those avatars and i wonder is it a server glitch or is it 4 different people (it's usually the latter)

That's the bit i haven't figured out yet i'm afraid, perhaps the last semi automatic signals ID plate gives this info? but they are very hard to read when you are moving. The Polish drivers schedules / timetables don't have the Esig, Asig, Bksig stuff on them like German ones do unfortunately. I'm playing around with Polish drivers schedules, making a PDF version sized to fit on a 6 inch screen of a kindle type e-ink reader, but i can't see from the data train drivers have to them on the paper timetables where the 'station limits' end. They show speed limit locations, the actual station / post location, your times, train data etc, and then some codes about what each 'station' has, like the radio channels in use, if it's got SHP on the signals and so on (that's the R1, H, SS) stuff on the bottom right of each station entry, But none of this tells me where the station limits end and you go onto automatic block signals (if i'm reading the timetable wrong, please tell me)

oh... i didn't know that, i kinda wondered why it wasn't before every station on the route.

all of that is planned from what i read on the forum and release notes on steam, Random events, more realistic timetables etc, just remember the sim is in Early Access mode, so the idea is to find and fix the bugs, so a simple timetable that repeats over and over makes that much easier, same with random events / failures, you don't want people reporting these as bugs, and also when trying to find and fix the real bugs, you don't want the 'what if this is caused by a random event triggering or not' thing.

The 'issue' is that if you press and hold the key to apply the train brake lever, it will move very fast and before you have time to react it's in the emergency position. I learnt early on that if you press the train brake apply key once briefly, it moves the handle from the 'run' to the 'initial' position, then when you press and hold the apply key again, it will move the lever slowly around the quadrant, all the way to the stop before the 're-apply / full service brake' position... this can take ~5 seconds to move the full length of the apply brakes portion of the valve. So, the handle will move rapidly between the main notches, but when you press the apply key once, it puts it into the main braking range where it moves slower than before, giving you much more precision on applying the brakes. i kind of see that as the best way to simulate an analog lever with unequal notches on the keyboard, as the lever in real life would have different strength notches / detents, meaning that to pull the lever from the run to initial position, you'd need to give it a little tug to move it over the detent between those 2 position, then it seems to be smooth until the notch that tells you that you're about to move the lever into the 're-apply / full service brake' position, then after that there would be a much harder detent you have to move over to get into emergency.

A work around for now... When in this loco, press escape, go to the menu for graphis, turn off mirrors, apply, turn them back on, apply ... mirrors will work now. Unfortunately i have to do this every time i start SimRail again... but until a patch is out, i can at least have working mirrors with a few mouse clicks.

Below is a single page of the timetable i'm currently working on, the last 3 columns that repeat the trains length weight, max speed, brake settings etc i am still playing about with how best to display those, i'm thinking of having 2 pages, so the normal page shows the timetable info upto column 7 'Godzina' , and 'turning' to the next page will show just those 3 columns of train data, then to go to the next timetable page you just 'turn the page' again and so on. Or i could just omit those except for on the 1st page / title page, as they are more for setting your train up, and reminding you your trains length. I still have lots to learn about Polish drivers schedules, like how to categorise the trains for the title as they are not the same as the designations used for the public / passengers timetables (i.e. TLK services are purely named for the public, and a different 3 letter code is used for drivers schedules / timetables), there is some bits missing in the test that says : ECi 41132 (12345) Bohumín - Warszawa Gróchow The (12345) should be the number of the train in the timetable database (SKRJ) and there's some other info missing too that i need to learn how to find. I'm having to reference lots of different things people have posted on google over the years like old drivers timetables, speed limit sheets etc, but i haven't got a single source of all the data for the area covered in SimRail for the era ~ 2018, so i'm having to manually double check things just to get the distances to 3 decimal points as is found on real drivers timetables (and i likely make many mistakes along the way) But i have the basics in excel where i can change the trains number and it auto updates the times to suit the service, then i can save the relevant portions of the timetable as a PDF and load it onto my Kobo, and it shows pretty nicely, i know others can do way more complex stuff in excel, like auto generate timetables just from the service number, but i only started playing with it a week or so ago, so each timetable is set out manually, but pulls data from a central sheet so i can update one thing and it will change all others versions. i'm amazed i got this far 🙂

Apparently i'm not alone in wishing to be able to drive in SimRail with the HUD off, but to do this i need a drivers schedule / timetable so i know where i am along the line... the speed limits coming up and stations to stop at etc, a real life train driver does this by referencing their drivers schedule to the hectometer boards that are every 200 meters along the tracks. Now, apparently the dev's are working on realistic drivers schedules / timetables for SimRail, which is awesome, yet another reason Simrail is the future of railway simulators i believe. I think these official schedules / timetables will be shown on the screen (like they do in Zusi / Maszyna by pressing a button to show or hide them) Or maybe they can be integrated into the trains cab, i.e. showing on the paper schedule holder in the EU/EP07, and on the screens of the other trains perhaps. <this is purely my speculation, and i could well be wrong> So... on the 8th of february i noticed RWag78's post about about the speed limit timetables he is working on, he's manually driven all the routes and noted down the speeds, distances, stops etc, and created a very comprehensive list of all the data in at least 3 different formats that people can use for timetable creation : https://forum.simrail.eu/topic/4534-timetables-and-speed-limits/ He's said he posted the data so others can make timetables from them... if i have got that wrong please tell me, and i will immediately stop as the last thing i want is to steal others work that's not intended to be used like this. I immediately saw the potential and spent the next day (my birthday) learning how to use Excel! then i kind of took over his post with many photo's of my ideas for the timetables <sorry about that> 😬 Now most people just want a list of distances that line up with speed limits and stations to stop at, along with the times for their train, and for that WRag78's work is ideal, he's made some very easy to follow timetables that look like this : But me being me... i want as much immersion as i can get when i drive a train in SimRail, so i wanted the timetables to look like the real ones a Polish train driver would have in their cab, also i wanted to show them on an old kindle e-ink reader i had been saving for this purpose. So i had a play about and came up with a few different layouts, getting off on the wrong foot to start with by referencing a timetable style that was not used by the PKP since about 2010, i slowly figured out the basics of excel, and managed to come up with a kinda passable timetable layout: The eagle eyed will notice that's not a kindle, but a Kobo Clara HD mounted upside down, i bought it just for displaying these timetables as the kindle wasn't to my liking with it turning itself off every 10 minutes and other small things i didn't like. I now know a few other people are working on similar projects, and i don't want to be competing or anything. So my version is going to be kinda specific, as i am laying things out to display properly on the 6 inch screen of a typical e-ink device, they will be saved as individual pages like a book, in PDF format, and then in folders containing the days timetables for each service, so that you can search for the train number to load the relevant timetable 'book', then simply swiping / tapping to turn the page will load the next part of the timetable... (rather than zooming and scrolling) I could also easily change the column widths in excel and make them suitable for larger devises, but my project is more about getting things spaced out to fit on the small screen of a kindle / kobo e-ink device.

it's just me getting my letters mixed up again i think, i probably got the IC and EIC services mixed up... i had been searching for a specific service number on the side mentioned above, and somehow got it showing it being run by a pendulino (type) train after a certain date, but a loco hauled EU07 or EU09 train before a certain date.