Noel,
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You responded directly to me, but I think that your on-going confusion may also be something that others may encounter, so I am replying via the group.
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In your email to me, you state:
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Thanks once more for your assistance.
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I have done as you suggested, however I’m still confused about Track 05 and the switcher serving it.
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The reason for my uncertainty, a switcher has to have no direction defined for it to serve a location.
The new pooled Track 05 is made up of two Interchange tracks that have the direction defined. Is that correct?
Therefore the switcher cannot use Track 05?
Or, have I got it totally wrong?
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Also, I’m very interested to hear about Schedules in the future once I get this sorted out.
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I think that your confusion maybe partially due to the differences of logical tracks and physical tracks. JMRI uses logical tracks and aspects that do not directly relate to the physical setup of a layout. Part of this difference is in the definition of the different spurs which are your industrial tracks. If you indicate that the track does not have a direction, this means that the program will ignore the track when building a train as the direction is an indication as to which trains can service the spur. However, if a train is defined to operate a single location route (which, by the way, must have a direction) the program ignores that direction and basically identifies the train as a switcher. The logic then says that the switcher can service any track at the location, regardless of the direction settings on the spur, yard, C/I. The logic ignores the direction.
However, for a train that stops at the location to drop off / pick up cars, the direction is checked, and if the train direction is the same as the direction indicated on the spur (or yard or C/I), then the program looks to see whether there is a car to be delivered or picked up, and if there is, then it adds that car to the switch list.
As I have got more and more into Ops Pro, I am amazed at the complexity of the logic built into the program (I am now retired, but my entire working life was working with programs and how people used those programs, so I can follow logic paths). The program, when it builds a train, looks at every car that the train may pickup, and determines whether it can deliver that car. If it cannot deliver, it then looks as to whether it can move the car closer to the destination. I have examples on my club's layout where a car needs to go through 4 different trains, two yards and a yard track at a small station to get from source to destination. The program does this check for every car.
So, if your final destination is an industrial spur (which does not have any direction set) the program will recognise this, and will try to move the car to somewhere where another train, in your case the switcher train, can move it to the spur. This stop is your Track 5 (being the logical arrivals track). For cars going from your location, the program will see that the car can move from the spur to Track 5 (logical departure track), and then another train can pick up the car and move it on towards its destination.
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As for using schedules, Pete Johnson has written a 4 part series entitled "Adding Custom loads to PosPro to increase car movement" that you should read, and probably re-read several times to take it all in (I know that I ended up re-reading them multiple times). These documents provide a lot of information as to how schedules work and how they can be used.
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Eric
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