After one month of beta development 1.5 has been made the default game version. It contains many UI and UX improvements to the new order system, making it easier than ever to to give manual orders to a group of trains and to use depot gameplay. The auto run system is also improved, and 1.4 imported lines and new lines default to easy, hands off auto run settings.
The central, foundational rule of the new 1.5 system is: every train arrival and departure in a station has a fixed time in the week.
How to run lines in auto mode
Create a line. Assign trains to run it in auto mode (the default mode). That's it, no more settings are needed. The game automatically keeps a timetable and calculates a fixed interval as you add or remove trains.
How to run a train group with daily scheduled train downtime, the easy way
1) Create a line. The default time settings are okay, but since the trains running the line are going to have a daily downtime period, you can switch the duration to minimal, since it does not really need to perfectly fit any given period.
2) Buy a train and set it to manual orders on purchase time. This will be your train group leader or parent.
3) In the train editor, select the Orders tab for the new train, click "Append new order", and set it to run your line every day of the week, with a departure of 6 in the morning:
4) If you wanted to have the train run all day, you would be done. This setup is a bit inefficient since the line duration does not divide 24h and you are asking the train to run for 24h, so the run just before 6:00:00 is a bit longer, but it's not important since you are also going to add a depot line and that extra round up time will be spent in the depot.
5) In 1.5 "depots" are actually lines. This decouples the act of a train being in downtime from the physical location of a depot. A regular station which does normal pax service during the day is a perfectly valid depot at night, so we can just use the first station of this line as the depot stop. Depot lines are just regular lines with a service level set to "technical maneuvers". This tells pax to avoid this line, and tells trains it is allowed to despawn when they reach a stop (this can be disabled too).
To create a depot line, click the "Create depot line" in the line editor listing, then click on the station platform which serve as a depot.
6) Now go back to the train orders, and add a second order for the newly created depot line, configured to "arrive no later than" 1:00:00, and set to not loop until next order. By unchecking the loop setting, you tell the train to stay put until the next order starts in the morning. Since the selected line is in technical mode, this wait will be done with the train despawned.
And this is how the train schedule looks like after adding the new depot order:
7) You are almost done. Having only one train run these orders might not be enough to service the pax demand, so let's add some trains. Click in the Group tab of the manual train, select the regular line in the drop down of "Duration of", and then click in "Clone as copier" to add as many trains to the group as you want.
And this is it. Your train group now runs a regular pax line during the day, and spends a few hours stored away at night. You control this with exactly two orders in a single train, with all other trains in the group automatically copied and spaced in time.
How to run a train group with daily scheduled train downtime, the aesthetic way
It is possible to create stations to serve as dedicated physical depots if wanted. These are still normal stations, buy you might want to tone down some styling, like disabling buildings around the platforms.
The next step is to create a depot line. But this time we are going to add all the platforms in the station as secondary platforms:
To be able to select secondary platforms for a stop, you first need to select a path signal to serve as the platform distributor. This signal must be able to "see" inside all the secondary and the main platforms, without any other signal cutting the path. You can verify this with the signal editor:
When you use this depot line in your train orders, trains will prefer to pick a secondary platform, and remain spawned during the night, for a depot storage aesthetic:
Trains which do not fit in the available secondary platforms will pick the main platform and despawn there.
Development log
The journey to 1.5 has been long, check the summer devblogs for development progress and the new September devblog for the beta changes:
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-june-2022/
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-july-2022/
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-august-2022/
https://carloscarrasco.com/nimby-rails-september-2022/