MSTS, London and south coast addon- Brighton

[Neil Polo]

I was approaching Brighton from Portsmouth in a class 415 emu and on the final bend out of the tunnel, just before the platforms come into view, the train stopped. Stopped dead on full throttle. Right on the bend. Is it possible that this is a bug, or is there some reason why the train would stop moving? I did think maybe I’d been too slow coming in and I’d ended up between breaks in the third rail . I was keeping to the speed limits. The next time I tried coming in a lot faster and had no problem. Has anyone else encountered this?

 

[GB]

MSTS is a very very old game and isn't equipped to simulate "gapping" (breaks in 3rd rail). In fact from what I can remember it can't really simulate 3rd rail at all (other than the route being made overhead electric and the wires at 0m), it was usually a case of making the whole route overhead electric and making the wires 1000's of feet in the air out of view and using track textures for 3rd rail. So I suspect what you describe above is a bug.

 

[Neil Polo]

Ah ok. Thanks.

So using wires to simulate third rail would allow the pantograph key to essentially connect and disconnect what would be a shoe from the imagined third rail?

 

[Flange Squeal]

So using wires to simulate third rail would allow the pantograph key to essentially connect and disconnect what would be a shoe from the imagined third rail?

Correct, and on some pantograph-equipped trains you will also see the pantograph is animated and move up/down accordingly. Some of the sound file creators used the pantograph button (P) on non-overhead electric trains to play a door open sound when lowering the non-existent pantograph, and a door closing sound when raising it - the theory being that you wouldn't move a train with pantograph lowered/doors open, so the effect worked quite well. Some adventurous modellers went even further and used the pantograph animation feature to have the passenger doors physically opening and closing as pantograph animations - I think it was the Northern Line route/train from UKTrainSim.

 

[Neil Polo]

Thanks for the info. I google UKTrainsim but the links are all dead. Was this site shut down?

 

[Flange Squeal]

Which links are you trying? It seems to be working for me? https://www.uktrainsim.com/

 

[Neil Polo]

That one works ok. For some reason o couldn’t access it from the links that came up on google. Maybe it brought up old links which had been disused.

 

[Sad Sprinter]

Ah I remember that game, got it for my eleventh birthday. Were you using Open Rails at all?

 

[Neil Polo]

I don’t know what that is so possibly not.