Hi all,

Is that english, "how to shuttle"?

Anyway, I have been away from mrr for some 6 months, because I bought a new house (with a bigger trainroom, too) and spent most of my time with painting, moving, and all that jazz. I did suffer from mrr withdrawal symptoms lately, so last week I made a small test layout to have some trains running again.
But in the mean time my dealer helped me with updating my CS-1 (60212), which was not functioning very well, to a CS-2 (60213). That really is a joy to play with![:p]. I've learnt the basics in just a few hours (special thanks to Lutz for his technical info), and I'm loving it.

So now I'm trying to make a shuttle train. Two contact rails, one S88, one train (Lint 37730) defined as shuttle (very easy), and things should work, right? Not quite, but after some playing around I got to it. Here are the things I encountered, comments are most wellcome.

1. At first the Lint did not react at the contact rail at all, just kept running. To test the contact rails, I made them change a switch. After a while, I got that working ok.
2. AFAIK, the S88 should be grounded - just as it was with 60212. But that does not work. When I "ungrounded" it, it did work.
3. Back to the shuttle. I defined the waiting time for the Lint-shuttle on 5 seconds. When the Lint passed the contact rail, it started braking (). But for this train the brake delay is defined at some 10 seconds, so halfway it made a sudden stop and changed direction.
4. That's easy to fix (longer waiting time), but now the Lint passed the contact rail, came to a beautiful stop, changed direction, passed the contact rail again, came to a beautiful stop again, changed direction again, etc.
5. So my conclusion: each time the contact rail is passed, in whichever direction, is seen as an endpoint for the shuttle.
6. I fixed that by disabling the accelaration and brake delay for the Lint. Now it works perfectly as a shuttle, going from contact rail 1 to contact rail 2 and back. But with sudden stops and not with it's beautiful brake-delay.
7. Defining a mid-point for the shuttle works perfectly as well. Works the same as an end-point, without changing direction.
8. Should I make the contact rail for the end-points 2 meters long, so the train can brake within that section without passing it?
9. I am thinking of designing a layout with a dogbone for the big trains and a single-track shuttle line for some local trains. Did any of you incorporate a shuttle line on your layout?
10. Such a shuttle-line would be more interesting if it could be combined with a small shadow station at each end, so several trains can run on it. Anyone tried that yet?

Peter