Hey there,

I use Rocrail to control my layout. Essentially, I've set it up so that schedules are assigned to locomotives in a particular sequence - almost like a choreography. In the schedules, there are action controls that trigger certain actions, such as assigning new schedules to different locomotives. This ensures that trains follow the same sequence, as long as they start in the same position.

Since I have many terminal tracks, I frequently use the "swap logical direction" option in the schedule block controls. This is especially useful for shunting and switching operations, which I've been able to automate thanks to Johnjean for bringing the XML scripting in to my attention.

All schedules can of course be assigned manually and I've tested and built them this way, and everything works as expected. However, there is one issue I've noticed when running the "full show", meaning that I start the schedule that is supposed to be the number 01 in the sequence and all the others follow that "automatically" by action control. One of the schedules consistently fails to swap the logical direction of a locomotive, which means that the locomotive doesn't end up where it's supposed to. This only happens when running the "full show", not when assigning the schedule manually.

Additionally, there's another case where a schedule triggers an action for another locomotive, but it never gets triggered unless I've manually started the originating schedule.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced similar issues with Rocrail and, more importantly, if anyone has found a way to overcome them?

I'm running Rocrail with 2,2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7 with 16 gigs of RAM so that should not be a problem.

Best regards,
Eino

Hi Eino,

I don't have experience of implementing the kind of complex behaviour that you are aiming at.

With that said, if indeed your schedules work as intended when executed individually, but lead to unexpected behaviour when executed in parallel, it would appear that there is some unintended interference between parallel activities. Rocrail makes no effort to protect the unwary programmer.

I have seen simpler instances of that when two instances of an action were triggered (nearly) simultaneously. These two instances are not insulated in parallel threads, as they would in a more solid programming environment, but happily share the same data and mess up each other (in my case, the triggers got mixed up). My solution was to create several distinct actions performing the same operations so that each action is only launched by one source.

Just like Jean said, the same goes for XML scripts: if there is a chance that the same piece of XML could be launched twice in parallel, the resulting behaviour may well be unexpected. Again, duplication may help.

(The "toggle lock" Jean mentioned sounds pretty much like the concept of "semaphore" in operating systems, named after the real things appearing along railroads.)