damerell

I've been playing Railworks, a train driving simulator, which is very jolly - albeit I notice perhaps targetted at slightly harder core enthusiasts than me (if I spend 55 minutes driving an HST from Paddington to Oxford I would like a more eventful journey than stopping at Reading [1] and being slowed by signals for two moves onto a slower speed track) - and am gently contemplating the steam locomotive controls [2] and the Engine Driver's Handbook.

However, something I don't really understand is this; a caution signal is described, almost everywhere, with the vague term "be prepared to stop at the next signal". Is there any convention for what signal spacing is so that you know, say, on a 125mph line you will have to decelerate to 40mph for a caution signal, or is this all down to route knowledge?

This is made trickier by the way that you can't really see signals very well a long way off and at night, light signals facing the other way bloom a bit from the back (gah). This isn't so bad - the game HUD tells you about the next signal, which would be too easy unless you (in the interests of sportsmanship) require yourself to actually spot it before taking action.

[1] Unlike (Open)BVE it doesn't really care if you stop in the wrong place - the last carriage, with all the posh people in, was hanging off the platform. Tee hee, but must try harder.

[2] An enormous improvement over Trainz, which had a serious case of virtual cockpit syndrome - there's no HUD with the state of all the controls and instruments on a steam locomotive (sure, a real one doesn't have one, but a real one has two sets of eyes who don't have to fiddle with the mouse to look around them) and one of the controls has no keyboard shortcut and can only be controlled by mouse tugs - nothing important, I think, just something like the regulator or the reverser [3].

[3] for non-nerds this is a JOKE and both these controls are very important.