Problem Connecting main railway station

[Xander Dax 310]

Hey i recently downloaded the main railway station by rajfurke.

 

However i just cannot seem to get it to connect to my elevated rail, i have tried HSR and monorail as well no luck, i know others seem to have had this problem as well.

So i was wondering if anyone has gotten this station to work? and if so how?, or if anyone knows of a solution to the problem.

 

thanks for any help. xander dax

[Magneto 316]

Hey Xander

 

The station neither supported light rail travel type nor was transit-enabled but it should be ok now. Replop station and see if it works as intended

 

 

[Xander Dax 310]

Thank you for that Magneto....You know i must say for a supervillian you have been extremely helpful lol thank you again.

[z1 566]

Actually, this station was designed for elevated heavy rail, and it did support that... mostly.  It wasn't designed for light rail.  However, the transit enabling was flawed, and the transit switches are not kosher in either version of the station.  It looks like it will work partially.  It can be made to work a whole lot better.

 

I'll take some time in the next day to make a proper, NAM Certified version of this station.  But with all those lines, it seems only sensible to construct it as an elevated heavy rail station, as it was originally built.  It will work with the NAM's Viaduct Rail.

[Magneto 316]

You're right, I checked again, turns out messed the transit switches I added... Apologies to anyone who downloaded this. Promptly deleted.

 

That being said, it seems that A BUNCH of stations have unproperly modded transit switches properties. I trust none but NAM & RTMT ones...

 

Is there any litterature on the subject on how to properly set up transit switches depending of travel types the station has? I haven't seen anything about it in the MTA pdf... could it be that I missed it?

[z1 566]

That being said, it seems that A BUNCH of stations have unproperly modded transit switches properties. I trust none but NAM & RTMT ones...

 

A while ago I made the interesting discovery that all transit stations were broken in one way or another.  Sometimes the error was fairly minor, such as setting the Transit Switch Entry Cost to zero, but there are plenty of stations where that property is set to one, which essentially disables that station and any network it's connected to up until the next station.  Other stations have capacities that are far too low, and would break under normal use.  Still others had transit switch points that made them totally inoperable.  I remember coming across a train station on an official disk (site unnamed  to protect the guilty) where the switches were so broken that the Sims could neither board nor get off trains - they could merely watch them pass by.  The switches also allowed parking, even though the lot had no parking facilities.  (This is unfortunately rather common among rail stations, where people often just blindly copy the transit switches from the Maxis train station.  If the tracks actually pass through the lot, this has the additional effect that all freight traffic is blocked.)

 

As for transit switches, you can see examples of traditional transit switching in the RTMT and SFBT stations (the latter also being of very high quality).  The system is easy to understand, and makes sense, and for years, this is the way knowledgeable transit modders built their stations.  It wasn't until the preparations for NAM 31 that the MTA (that's the Mass Transit Authority, a part of the NAM) discovered that for multi-network stations, these switches are either insufficient (in that transfers that should be able to happen, don't) or suboptimal (in which Sims going into the station take a route out that is not the fastest one, or the station simply doesn't attract the number of Sims to it that it should - they bypass the station without using it).  So in a long series of extensive tests, the MTA Team came up with a set of transit switches that worked best for each type of multi-network station.  (Here "type" does not mean network type, but number and arrangement of networks.)  These are the NITS (NAM Ideal Transit Switches), and the first batch of them was ready for all stations in NAM 32 that had a rail network plus bus and subway service.  If you look at these transit switches, it's clear that their derivation was not at all obvious.  Yet they result in transit stations that perform anywhere from 30% to 100% better (in terms of the number of Sims using them) than the versions of these stations that use standard transit switches.  The Sims using these stations are also much more intelligent about the routes they take.

 

Is there any litterature on the subject on how to properly set up transit switches depending of travel types the station has? I haven't seen anything about it in the MTA pdf... could it be that I missed it?

 

Well, it just so happens that I've started working on a tutorial entitled, "How to Build a Proper Transit Station", which will contain all this information and more, including the information in the current , which will be superseded by this tutorial.  I hope to have this tutorial finished in the next week or two.  Stations that are built according to guidelines in this tutorial (or modified to fit them) and passed by the MTA Team will be "NAM Certified", and will be listed as such in the NAM documentation, along with a link to the station.

 

Meanwhile, the MTA has a long term project known as the SLURP (Station Locator, Updater, and Reconstruction Project) which has as its aim fixing all SC4 stations by adding station overrides for them into the NAM.  This was started in NAM 32, and will be continuing on, but first I have to go finish RTMT 4.0 (which is also having its transit switches upgraded).

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

That really sounds like a very big load of work.  Summer project?

[z1 566]

That really sounds like a very big load of work.

Well, it is. I've found that I can SLURP four or five stations an hour, so although that's still a lot of hours, it's certainly doable.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Bless you, my lad.  Tedious stuff like that would drive me batty.

[Magneto 316]

Hey, some of us are enjoying modding more than gaming actually...

z if I read you right the new RTMT is to be released very soon then? And, will you post the tutorial on the boards?

[Xander Dax 310]

Mmm went back to the original model of the station instead of Magneto's, and same problem the damn thing just will not connect and i tried EVERY kind of rail network.

[Magneto 316]

It was initially intended for heavy rail viaduct, so there's no possibility (yet) of dragging transit through it... Better wait for z's update

[Xander Dax 310]

Yea sounds like it, shame the creator didn't check all this himself first would have saved us all a lot of trouble lol

[z1 566]

Bless you, my lad.  Tedious stuff like that would drive me batty.

 

Well, all the parts of the NAM have their tedious aspects.  Building networks requires writing lots of rules in what amounts to machine language.  Now that would drive me batty.

 

z if I read you right the new RTMT is to be released very soon then? And, will you post the tutorial on the boards?

 

RTMT v4.0 is mostly done, but it still has a fair amount of work to be completed.  If all goes well, we'll be seeing a release sometime this spring.

 

As for the tutorial, yes, it will be posted both here and at SC4D.

 

Mmm went back to the original model of the station instead of Magneto's, and same problem the damn thing just will not connect and i tried EVERY kind of rail network.

 

The original station actually connects fine with Viaduct Rail.  You just have to know how to use puzzle pieces properly.  The station is then activated by dragging the rail tool along the length of each track in the station.

 

It was initially intended for heavy rail viaduct, so there's no possibility (yet) of dragging transit through it... Better wait for z's update

 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the updated station is still Viaduct Rail, and it is used in the same way as the original.  Here is a picture from one of the tests of the revised station in a small test city; the test was conducted by b22rian, one of the MTA Team members:

 

 

Yea sounds like it, shame the creator didn't check all this himself first would have saved us all a lot of trouble lol

 

Actually, the connections work fine, and the station does operate at a modest level.

 

The revised station lot file is attached below.  Virtually all of the modding had to be redone to meet NAM standards.  I'll list everything that was changed here, both so that you'll know what properties are different in the new station, as well as what the new values are.  Aside from the transit values, which were calculated according to the thread, all other numerical values were based strictly on the output of PIM-X, using a conservative filling degree of 0.2.  This is conservative in that to the extent this number is in error, it is on the low side, and various costs and other properties may be slightly lower than ideal.  They're plenty high, though, as you'll see.  However, compared to a bus stop on a tile-by-tile basis, this station is still a bargain.

 

Here are the changes:

• The transit switch point was replaced with the NAM standard transit switch point for this type of station.  This change took only a few seconds, requiring a simple copy and paste operation, but it results in the biggest change to the station.  There should be at least several times as many Sims using this station now, if not more, depending on your city.  The station now has the capability of acting as a true transportation hub for your city.
• According to NAM standards, a station this size would undoubtedly be connected to one or more bus lines, so I added bus service (which you can see in the middle left of the above picture).
• Previously, no paths were included for the trains in the station.  This means that automata and UDI would not work properly within this station, since all stations connected to puzzle-piece networks require internal paths.  This has been fixed.
• Previously, freight trains could not pass through this station.  This has been fixed, although only passengers can get on and off trains, since this is not a freight station.
• A station this size will have people arriving and departing by taxi, so I added a taxi generator.
• The information for the menu tooltip had never been filled in, so the station wasn't even properly identified in the menu.  This has been fixed, and a small amount of info about the station has been included.
• The menu icon was replaced by the one that PIM-X generates, which is much more distinctive.
• The station was moved from the Misc Transit menu to the Rail menu, since it is primarily a rail station.
• One of the implications of the new transit switches is that a subway line will work equally well regardless of where it passes under the lot.  You don't need to connect up to the subway square, or even have the line pass under the main building.
• As the station is primarily a rail station, and subway access is secondary, the game no longer enters the Subway Building View when you select the station from the menu.
• All of this comes at a cost, of course.  The previous plop cost of this station was §100 - the same as a single-tile Maxis bus stop.  Using PIM-X, the new plop cost is calculated to be §8700 for a station and lot covering 112 tiles.  Bulldoze cost went from §100 to §834.  And the monthly cost went from §20 to §480.  (For reference, the monthly cost of the far smaller Maxis Grand Rail Station is §300.)
• Jobs were distributed more realistically by PIM-X.  Old: R$: 95, R$$: 5, R$$$: 0. New: R$: 69, R$$: 33, R$$$: 6.
• The original building emitted no pollution of any kind.  Now, at the center, air pollution is 38, water pollution is 19, and garbage output is 76.  The radii for these pollution types is 1, 2, and 0, respectively.  The building emits no radiation.
• Power consumption is unchanged at 61.  However, the previous building consumed no water; the water consumption of the new building is 77.
• The transit switch entry cost was changed from zero, which allowed everything to pass through the station at infinite speed, to .0069, which is the standard passenger train speed.
• The station capacity was raised from 100,000 to 240,000.  A lot more Sims are going to be using this station.

Rather than simply post a link to this station in a comment in the author's station thread, I plan to contact the author directly, as I think he may be interested in using this for his main download.  For everyone else, give this station a try, and let me know how you like it!  (You'll still need to download the model from the STEX.)

 

EDIT:  I emailed rajfurke and explained the situation to him, and I got a really nice email back in return, where he said he didn't know much about transit modding, and would incorporate my lot into his download.  He has done so, and updated his download page.  I'll leave the attached lot here for another day or so, but then I'll delete it, as I don't have much of an upload allotment, and it's good in general to get the whole station from one place.