We were starting to get some regular activity on the railway in early Summer 2016, with several operating sessions. Then came the new kitchen, and the shed was filled with non railway "stuff" for a couple of months. That's now mostly gone, and we can start to look at the railway again.

I spent this weekend sorting out wiring and block detection in the approach to Portsmouth station. There were two separate issues to address:

  1. Trains had been exiting Portsmouth driving on the right hand track. I added a unidirectional critical block at the bottom of the hill up to Portsmouth on the approach side, so trans can't depart on that track. This needed one new sensor, and there were two sensors available on a BDL168 that were connected to the same power zone. However, it also turns out that the schedules had allowed that route - I've removed some blocks and routes to make sure there is only one "exit" track.
  2. Shunting operations in the station throat: the two blocks at the entrance to the station area didn't exactly match how the electrical detection was implemented. The detection made sense from the perspective of setting signals according to train movements; but they didn't match well to permit tracking of trains. A "proper" solution would have needed 3 new detectors. I've reached a workable solution with no new ones, just by reconfiguring. Now the final curved point onwards on the exit road belongs to the beginning of the block running down the hill to Eastleigh junction, rather than belonging to the end of the block in the throat. All the expected shunting operations result in correctly tracked movements. There is still one inconsistency - the point into the container yard is incorrectly placed on the block diagram, but train tracking follows all train movements correctly.

Earlier in the week I made some improvements by editing a couple of schedules, where the full set of required routes weren't included. This was probably the consequence of "copy a working route then edit it" with over-enthusiastic editing. Te result was a schedule sequence where trains got most of the way through a sequence then stopped in the fiddle yard; the reason was because there was a planned exit from one track in the fiddle yard but not the others. The sequence would have worked correctly on that one track.

Schedule sequences, now we've got to the bottom of that problem, do appear to be the way to go. We can create simple "base" schedules for the main components of a train journey, then create specific journeys by chaining them together. We've been able to create longer journeys involving several laps of the railway, for example.

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