Railway/Railroad question

My business partner and I have recently acquired some land by a Linden Railway and this has got us interested in trains.

Is there a standard script one should use? I've taken a look round in-world and found several radically different examples, and the entry at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Railroad/SLRR_standards doesn't really help much. My impression is that I'll need to write my own, guided by what I can deduce from that, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel if I don't need to.

If you look at the history tab of the referenced wiki page, you'll see that it's all very recent and very much a work in progress.

AFAIK there are no "standard" rail scripts. There are a variety of systems in use on a variety of tracks. (Is the land you acquired on Heterocera Atoll? That's the continent that has the "SLRR" line, as opposed to several others.)

Shameless plug for a rail group of which I'm a member: You may find useful the maps and the freebie rail kit at the Second Life Railway Consortium headquarters across the tracks from Tuliptree station. The kit is a bit of a grab-bag of stuff from different rail systems, but I think there are some opensource scripts in there that may at least give some hints.

One thing to keep in mind is that, as that wiki page notes, not all railbed in SL is equipped with that center guide rail; indeed, not even all of the SLRR lines have it, and it's not clear that additional guide rail will be laid on the tracks that don't have it, or on any extensions to the existing SLRR tracks. On the other hand, I'd kind of expect it to remain where it's currently installed. (I gather this prim has been hotly contested.)

Also, there is an effort underway to make it possible for trains to know about other rail traffic and to avoid collisions. That's kind of important to keep from getting ARd, but right now there's nothing to alert a train operator that another train is approaching nor any suggested response that could avoid smashing into it, so it's all pretty haphazard and inconvenient. There are currently very few trains running, really, and yet there's not a lot of room for traffic growth until such a system is in place. And unfortunately there's not yet an interface spec nor reference implementation for trains to use the system--although all that is planned.

Qie beat me to it. That's a good kit. It should be somewhere around http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tuliptree/114/140/24/

Full turnkey railway script at the Guvnah's Mansion, Victoria City. Right by the front door in a box.

Notecard control over scheduling, route, stops, blowing the whistles, everything, plus examples. Plus natural recovery from region restarts and so forth so you don't have to chase it. Plus, a train model for starters and test.

Barney Boomslang wrote it; it's a Creative Commons licence. It's as simple as these things can be, also, which is the nice part.

I have just one train that I use on the SLRR. It's guided physically along the transparent central raised rail.
It works very well and adjusts for sim lag, so sim crossings tend to be smooth.
If it leaves the rails due to a fast speed on a curve or after a sim crossing, a simple 'tt' in Chat automatically puts it back on the track. That *really* beats using Edit to move it back.
It has chat commands to move sideways off the track in order to let other trains pass.

It has the Train Buddy script in it. This warns when other trains with Train Buddy are nearby. I think the Train Buddy is a standard shared by a number of builders.


Recently, I bought the Train Brain from the same source. It's a basic object with the scripts in it. You build your own vehicle and link the Brian the root prim.
It's more versatile as it works by following the axis of prims of a certain name, and as a selected elevation above the prims. It should work on any system where the road/rail/trolley-wire/monorail prims have a standard name in the system.

Beware of buying any train before determining what rail system it is designed for. I've seem some that only work on a completely proprietary rail set.



The Caledon system is easy to use. Its different to the SLRR system in that it moves between waypoints listed in notecards - as opposed to following guide prims.

Ah, and I should add: most of these things are free; if someone is trying to 'sell' you a train script, just remember there's very little reason to pay more than $L 0 for one of these things.

It's true that you can get free stuf.
The Caledon system is L$0, and it's a great one with which to set up your own system.

I've got some freebie vehicles that can travel on the SLRR.

However, it's an apples and oranges situation.

One could for instance, record every x,y,z move that would take an object along the path of the SLRR. If the Caledon system was being used, it would have to be modified to allow for other trains/objects in the way.
It might also have to be modified to allow the passenger(s) to stop the train for a look around.

I spent about L$400 - which is a bit more then L$0.
But for that I get
- cruise control at a suitable speed so that I can concentrate on looking around, and not be fixated on the process of driving. There is no steering to do.
- automatic finding of the track
- easy moves off the track and back again to let others pass
- automatic slowing at sim crossings
- good control of speed manually
- control of passenger sitting
I get to enjoy the journeys as journeys.
The experience is far superior to that of driving a vehicle along a route/road.

I could use a freebie, but would have to concentrate on the process of driving.

It's possible that the scripts for features that I paid for are available for free somewhere, but if they are, they have hidden themselves well.



I have no idea what LL have in mind for the railways.
Nigel Linden had some automated railcars rezzing and running between Spini and Jubata for about a week in the middle of October. I think he had them running on other stretches before that.
They tended to fly a bit, and sometimes two collided if the rezzing times at the stations got out of synch.
The current state of the grid is not kind to automated vehicles like that.

Well, $L 400 isn't bad, but I have *literally* heard of a person being offered a train script on par with Barney's (supposedly) for about $L 200,000.

They almost purchased it, too, then they talked to me. Heh, saved 800 bucks with one IM...

Thanks, all. The land is on Heterocera, at Athetis, just by Spini station, I think.

I've been round and picked up the various scripts, and am examining them at the moment. Very interesting. Though I take the point that the Caledon example is written for a different system.

I may well have a play at making something of my own, in the end, but I do want see what I can learn from the available examples. What do the invisible sensor prims do, i wonder, up above the track every so often?

And, Que, my apologies.. I expressed myself badly. I didn't intend to criticize the wiki page; I just meant I hadn't been able to resolve my question by reading it. I didn't mean to suggest it isn't helpful in general because, of course, it is.

The flat transparent prims over the track are train sensors. I think that they go back a bit.

They also rezz the SLRR trains that Nigel Linden has been running there recently.

(Corrected the post above whare I said Andrew instead of Nigel)

Yeah, but what happens when they sense a train -- and what are they looking for? Do I need to do anything special if I make a train, to make sure they sense it, or do they just look for any moving object on the track, or what?

By experimentation, some of us in the Second Life Railway Consortium have determined much of the functionality of the LL train system, originally designed by Nigel, Eric, and Michael Linden.

The main Controller of the system is located in the Right Of Way (ROW) maps on the office wall of the ANWR prim drilling rig.

The Train Detectors you see placed along the SLRR ROW at various points and at each station provide two main functions - they rez a new train on command from the Controller, and they detect the passage of a train (or any scripted moving object). When a 'train' is detected, that information is transmitted to the Controller. As the train passes each Train Detector along the line, its passage is reported to the Controller. If the passage of a train is not reported often enough, the Controller assumes the train has been lost from the system and rezzes another unit from the Train Detector at the last reported position.

Each train can detect (by collision) a station or an End Of Line. At stations, the train stops, waits for 30 seconds, then continues. At EOLs, the train immediately reverses.

The train seen recently (Eric Linden's sleek SLRR Commuter v1.2), or 'Blue Train', ran quite well under Havok 1, but as scripted, travels too fast to hold the track under Havok 4. There was also a nice red Alco RS-3 locomotive by Michael Linden that made its way around the Atoll very well. This type of unit was used when two locomotives were tested on a run all the way around Heterocera and back in December of 2008 to demonstrate the working status of the new train scripts created by Moles of the LDPW.

Originally, the SLRR was divided into three control segments, SLRR Control North, SLRR Control South, and SLRR Control East. One break, between the East and the North segments, is at the Clearwing/Paranthrene Transfer Station. For years, another break, between the North and South segments, was between the Jubata station and an EOL in Torva. That land was recently acquired as SLRR ROW and is now tracked and functional.

When the system was running, the active control segments were denoted by colored LEDs on the Controller. On the South segment, passages of trains through each Train Detector and stops at stations were tracked by smaller LEDs displaying the train's location.

When one was near the Controller, messages from each active train reporting 'last seen at' and 'arrival at', with travel times, could be heard whispered in open chat.

The system is currently disabled, so no Linden trains are running.

The open source GSLR script from the Rail Rally 2008 Resource Kits collection appears to work very similarly to the way the SLRR scripts do. This script provides a good starting point for physical train building, and several Residents have used it successfully. These kits are available free at the SLRC headquarters across from Tuliptree Station.

Are any of these trains currently running? I'd love to see them!

You'll find trains running regularly on the ONSR (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/ONSR) and the GLSR .

The much larger SLRR (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLRR) is currently served only by private trains, and then usually only when there's a driver. I know one of the builders has a train that runs automated through some of that track once every couple of hours, but mostly it's currently used for private track-following car-like vehicles that look like rail stock. (Not that I think this is a sensible use of that system.)

The Zindra monorail operates on-demand; there's a huge station build in Mosh and others scattered elsewhere throughout the Kama City sims. (It's a bit more amusement park ride than train, but still: you can see it running.)

I'm pretty sure that the Bay City trolley is running, and that the Dore-Luna trolley is not.

On private islands, see the Caledon National Railway (), the Lackawanna (), and Barney Boomslang's train on Lummerland.

I'm interested in the railway thing. Where exactly is the 'Guvnah's Mansion', Des? I couldn't see that name anywhere

Try http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Victoria%20City/224/24/23.