Add an option to add/alter/remove penalties from stations (and possibly other elements)
What?
As far as I know, trains prefer paths that are "short" according to some penalty based heurisic system.
Among other things, trains are dissuaded from using tracks that have stations on them in order to avoid prevention of access to it, sometimes they might take long detours for this purpose.
Why?
Having the option to remove penalties from stations would have trains ignore it, which may be beneficial in some cases, and may be critical in others.
I have found a case where a few refueling stations cause trains to pick a blocked path (blocked by a train) over a completely empty block with merely a station in it, bringing the entire train network to a halt. Behold following image:
I uploaded the zipped scenario directory here: http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=121 ... 5198984161
Explaination:
- The selected train attempts to leave by turning into the station of either yellow train rather than just drive straight ahead.
- The yellow trains at the yellow stations are attempting to access a station that is disabled (the yellow one at the top of the image). In this state they appear to not cause any penalty to the block they are on.
- The two rose stations add enough penalty to the center path to cause this odd behaviour.
- Simply removing the offending stations (the two rose ones) penalty by checkbox would resolve the issue.
- Doubling the penalty of the two yellow stations would also fix it. (But adding a second station just for the penalty is ugly and feels redundant)
- Considering this to be a pathfinder bug (which it might be) and have it not ignore trains waiting for a disabled station would also fix it.