Phoning next box for early running trains - suggestion

Whilst using many of the Sims I own I will receive a message from an adjacent panel/box asking if I accept an early running train (often freight). I can then either accept the early train or ask the sending panel/box to hold the train until it's correct time.

However I believe there should be an option to request permission from the receiving panel/box before sending a train that is, let's say, more than 10 minutes early.

I'm currently playing the Sheffield Sim. So for example I'll get a message from Leeds/Ardsley asking if I'll accept 6Mxx running 34 minutes early.
I accept.
I can then just send the train to Tapton Junction and chesterfield without asking that panel if they will accept the early running train.

If that option was introduced I believe it would allow much more realism and an extra degree of planning on what to do with the train if they won't accept it

The consequences are felt just fine in chained games.

Players can regulate themselves without needing to be arbitrarily penalised by the sim. It makes the experience hostile to new players, who unless they come from a signalling background, already have a great deal to learn.

The consequences are felt just fine in chained games.

Players can regulate themselves without needing to be arbitrarily penalised by the sim. It makes the experience hostile to new players, who unless they come from a signalling background, already have a great deal to learn.

flabberdacks in post 155446 said:

The consequences are felt just fine in chained games.

Players can regulate themselves without needing to be arbitrarily penalised by the sim. It makes the experience hostile to new players, who unless they come from a signalling background, already have a great deal to learn.

So it might be best to confine this phone-ahead feature to higher difficulty levels (and exclude it entirely at sim exits where a chained sim is in place).

More generally, the option to refuse an out-of-order early runner would be no bad thing; the example of the sim running a cl6 in front of a cl1 is a particular annoyance if you've no way of stopping it. Even there, it would be worth making it a bit more sophisticated than just "can I run this please?" What the receiving bobby needs is to know whether the train booked to run first is itself late, and by how much, so they can guesstimate the impact of the early runner when it arrives on their panel (and some will decide they can afford putting a couple of minutes in an express that has recovery time while others will take the safer 'booked route, booked order' option).

It could all get quite complicated; I suspect it needs both core code and sim code to work well. But we seem now to have a product that gets all the main aspects right and we're talking about relatively minor enhancements, so I'd say this is worth putting on the list.

The line up feature allows you to check late/early running in advance of a train entering so its possible to run a line up for the first location after the entry point and see what's due before the train in question and how it's running.

flabberdacks in post 155446 said:

The consequences are felt just fine in chained games.

Players can regulate themselves without needing to be arbitrarily penalised by the sim. It makes the experience hostile to new players, who unless they come from a signalling background, already have a great deal to learn.

What proportion of users "chain" and what proportion use "stand alone"?

I for one have never chained with another user / SIM.

[quote]

This leads me to wonder whether it would be feasible to implement a feature where we could adjust the "train entering system" time for individual trains from the line-up screen, so that in the event of say a Class 6 being scheduled to enter 4 minutes ahead of a non-stopper, you could dial in a 5 minute delay to ensure that the Class 6 enters immediately behind.
I appreciate that this may be done by editing timetables, but I was thinking more of an easier 'on the fly' way of aiding your AI colleague with regulating decisions.


JAS