King George I TTS - Start Delay - Reading CVs with Railmaster

[BagEndJct]

I have updated my RM to the latest v1.66.

 

I am trying to get my King George I to operate more realistically. When it starts, it takes off almost immediately.

 

I read all the CVs, having remember to set the range to read as from "0 to 250". For CV 201 it says "not used". I have tried writing various values to this CV and they do "stick" but they have no effect whatsoever on start delay. When I read the CVs again within RM, it still says "not used" but does show the value that I last wrote to it (7!). Any ideas, please?

[Fishmanoz]

Not surprising it starts immediately as you've set a delay of 0.7 seconds.  Default is 25 and max 70, giving delays of 2.5 and 7 seconds.  Try writing something larger and if that doesn't work, write 8 to CV8 and everything will go back to default and your delay will be 2.5 seconds.  At least that's my reading of the leaflet.

[BagEndJct]

Doh! That could be the problem! Thanks. I'll report back. 

[BagEndJct]

Yes that was it!. What a silly billy. Thank you Fishmanoz for solving that one for me. Oddly I knew in my head it should be secs x10 for the delay but ignored it in all the excitement of being able to write to CV201! A setting of 30 works well for me. I just need to nudge the acceleration down (or is it up?) a bit. Once it does start, it sets off a bit too quickly. 

 

On a connected issue, the speeds are far too fast for my layout. I know I can set 'shunt' and 'cruise' speeds but is there a way of scaling the speed down over all?

 

Thank you all.

[Britannia Builder]

You can use the speed factor option on the loco setup screen to adjust the scale speed across the range. It's the stopwatch button at the bottom of the loco details screen. You can either set up the required track length and time the lap, or just use trial and error to get the speeds that suit you. I've loaded your KG1 TTS and looked at the data  in resource.mdb using my Excel spreadsheet, and the 'factor' in the database is 0.785. This needs to be reduced in order to reduce the speeds. If you enter 3 seconds as the lap time for the default track length and the default max speed of 100mph, this will set the factor to 0.642 which may well do the trick. If it's still too fast, tell it that it did the lap in 3 seconds at 80mph. This reduces the factor to 0.513. For some reason it won't accept times less than 3 seconds!

 

Regards, John

[BagEndJct]

Wow, thanks BB for working that out for me. I had previously looked at the scale speed section in the manual but most of it went over my head!

I will certainly try adjusting the settings. It applies to most of my locos so it would be great for them all to be to be a bit more "controllable" and realisitc in their behaviour.

 

Thanks again. I'll report back.

[BagEndJct]

John

 

I've only had time to have a brief look at this but can I confirm the default time to travel is the 2.75m option? I did enter the values suggested without observing a great deal of difference.

 

I still can't get my head round these figures. If the time to travel is lower, then isn't it going faster? So if I want to slow it down, I should be entering a higher figure? Or not, as the case may be??

[Britannia Builder]

Yes, it's the 2.75m track length that I used. You can calculate how long it should take to do 2.75 metres at 1/76 scale 100mph - 4.675 seconds by my calculation, but don't take my word as gospel! So if you enter a time less than this, eg 3 seconds, RailMaster will think the train was going too fast and will reduce the speed factor to slow it down. If you tell it that it took 3 seconds at 80mph it will slow it down even more. If that's not enough, try telling it that it did it in 3 seconds at 60mph.

 

Regards, John

[BagEndJct]

Got it! Thanks, John. I'll have a go with these settings and see what I get. Thanks again.

[BagEndJct]

I've entered 3 seconds at 50 mph and achieved a much better performance. Will apply it to my other locos that behave like maniacs on my tight 6x4 layout!

 

I now need to tune accereration rate a bit as it does still take off a bit smartish!

 

Thnak you.

[Britannia Builder]

That's good.

 

I entered the 50mph and 3 seconds into the KG1 TTS that I added to my system and it reduced the speed factor from 0.785 to 0.321, which is a big reduction! The speed steps being sent to the decoder are only 40% of what they were before. However I noticed that doing this also changed the maximum speed of the loco from 100mph to 50mph, although it left the cruising speed at 80mph. So clicking the fast-forward button for cruising speed is (probably) only giving you 50mph rather than 80mph. It would have been better to enter 100mph and 1.5 seconds, but for some unknown reason Railmaster doesn't allow the time to be less than 3 seconds.

 

I then tried using the 6.274m track length option and this (illogically) still allows times down to 3 seconds to be entered. So using this track length with a top speed of 100mph I entered 3.5 seconds as the lap time and this gives a factor of 0.328, almost exactly what you got with 3 seconds on the short track at 50mph. So it might be better to set it up like this, to avoid artificially reducing the cruising speed?

 

Regards, John

[BagEndJct]

I'll try that, John and, as ever, report back. Thank you so much for the time you've spent on this. Now I have another question, so starting yet anothe thread. Thank goodness for this forum else I think I'd be making no progress whatsoever!