RAILROADS Online – Stage Your New Cars Quicker: Hump Yard Physics

I find buying new cars and getting them staged for use rather tedious. Either you use the re-rail tool to move them manually OR you use an engine to move them more realistically. Either way takes time.

I think there is a better way. In the real world, railroads rely on physics to reduce the workload when sorting cars. A “hump” is built into the yard at its throat, cars are pushed over that hump and decoupled. Gravity takes over, pushing the car down hill. All that is required to sort the cars to appropriate tracks is to provide a short pause between uncouplings and to throw the switches at the right times.

Why not use that to simplify and speed up the purchasing process? This guide will explain how.

Modifying the Starting Track Location

All credit goes to Draslin !

Follow these steps:

1. Add a 1 meter long strech to the end of each of the 3 stalls in the start location.
2. Add another strech of any length.
3. Delete the track you created in the first step. Now we have a gap between the original starting tracks and the track we created in step 2.
4. Add another stretch to the track you added in Step 2, but add it to the end facing the original starting tracks.
5. Make sure you in curve mode with a 0 degree radius, and increment the gradient to about 2% Use the 3 ft Rail II track.
6. Now drag that all the way back to the edge of the platform at the opposite end of the original starting tracks.
7. Now add one more section to the end of that track, but increase the gradient to 10%. Make it about 14ms.

How to Use This

Follow this procedure:

1.Buy cars until all the tracks are full. The cars will fall onto your new rail, rather than the original rails.

2. Add your links to the cars, and the first pin to secure it.
3. Now, disengage the brakes. Most of the time, they’ll start rolling. If they don’t, you can re-rerail a car on the 10% grade and it will definitely start rolling.
4. Let gravity do the work. You can jump on the trailing car and add the second pin once gravity has pushed it into the next car, and so on until they are all connected.

Final Thoughts

You could add a 3 way switch so that all three tracks flow into the same staging track. They’ll roll quite a ways so you should be able to get quite a string before you need to bring an engine in. You could also tweak how long the graded track is to ensure they roll further.

Hope this helps someone. Its certainly made my workflow less frustrating.