List of engines for comparison?

[low_grade]

Just wondering, has anybody compiled a more or less complete list of engines available together with their speed profiles and other characteristics? Was just reviewing the discussion on electric engines and wanted to find some examples of electric engines that could, but came up empty...

If not, is there an easy way to review the engine files and extract that info? I might be up to the task of compiling such a list and posting it here if one is not already available and this is possible.

[Hawk]

Have you looked at the bottom of this page? http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/Tips_Tuts_Utils.htm

[low_grade]

Ah, now that you mention it, I discover that I have downloaded that PDF and then misplaced it. I have found it again. Thanks.

By the way, I've been working on a comparison model for various conditions, including desired train length, grade, cargo type, and route length, and in the process it appears I must disagree with some of the listed climbing ability values. I'd love to offer what I think is an improved list of characteristic values, if anybody's interested. In addition to the usual Fuel Usage, Acceleration, Reliability, and Passenger Appeal as well as Climbing Ability I find it useful to include a Power characteristic that represents how well an engine can pull a lot of cars, which is not always the same as its ability to go up a grade. I basically opened a sandbox and divided the speed for 8 cars by the speed for 1 car on a 0% grade and rounded to get a 0 to 10 scale represented by Atrocious through Near Perfect, as usual. To improve climbing ability I divided the speed for 1 car at 6% grade by the speed for 1 car at 0% grade to get a similar scale. I played around with opening a sandbox when cars are 80 tons vs 40 tons and setting cargo from express to freight until I got what looked like pretty well normalized results (that is, an even distribution, not a whole bunch of near perfects and no atrociouses, for example.)

The model itself is a spreadsheet and not very user friendly, though it works for me, but I'd be happy to transfer the characteristic lists into a simpler spreadsheet (I don't have a PDF maker that I know of.)

Anyway let me know.

[Hawk]

Can you zip it up and attach it to a post? Attachment size limit is 10 MB max.
I don't have a pdf writer either but I think a couple of others here do.

[Grandma Ruth]

I'd certainly be interested. I love RT, but I'm not actually a railway enthusiast in the sense of being a "train-spotter" so I don't know about engines and their capabilities in the real world like some do. So a list would be really useful, thanks.

[low_grade]

Okay, here's a couple of files. The Loco Chart is the simple list. Loco comparison RT III bears some explaining.

To repeat the comment I left with the file, this is a complex messy modeling spreadsheet that you may be able to have fun with if you're familiar with excel. Enter a year at the top, then select all the rows starting with the second row, then sort your data (with header row) first by "Available now?" descending then by "Year Available" Ascending. Scroll across to compare the locos available in the situations you're dealing with. Higher numbers are better. This is not an absolute comparison, it is comparison relative to cost, to find where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

Hope somebody gets some use out of these! It's great to contribute to the community.

Admin Edit: Files deleted. Updated version is available in the Extras section. http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/xtras/xtras5.htm#tuts

[Hawk]

That loco comparison list is pretty comprehensive.
Good job!

Is it available to be added to the Extras section?

[low_grade]

Thanks! I enjoy geeking out with number crunching like that, so it was my pleasure. It's really great to see a game that bears such deep analysis.

And absolutely, if you think my product is siteworthy, go ahead and put it up! I'd be honored!

Btw, did you notice any of the changes that I made to the climbing ability from the PDF that's already posted? One surprise I had is that while the Challenger and Big Boy Trains were both listed as Mountain Kings, they really only pulled at about half their top speeds when faced with a 6% grade, and in my book, that is only average climbing ability. Compared to a Shay, which still pulls at 90% of its top speed at the 6% grade, these guys are chumps. In my more in depth analysis, it became obvious that neither of these two trains are worth their high costs in any situation. The P-2, E18, F3, U1, EF66, and A1 are all better trains at tough grades (if available...) and the H10 compares pretty good, too, for such an early train.

I was wondering if some of the trains are just plain imbalanced compared with the rest of the field, and how many of these outstanding trains were original to RTIII and how many were added by the community afterwords. It appears that scenario builders can have a lot of fun just deciding what trains to allow, forcing us players to make tough choices.

Knowing what trains may be about to pop up is important when deciding when to expand a rail network, since for instance in the scenario I'm playing now, Age of Steam IV Blue Diamond, although I went with a lot of Eight Wheelers with three cars each early on, I stopped building out my network and started focusing on industry at about 1908 waiting to see if I would get the Class S or Atlantic. I was sad to see when I started the scenario that there was no Class 500 available, though that train is one of those just obscenely good trains for its period, but was happy to get the Mastodon so I could pull a few long trains around, too. No Class S, but the Atlantic is now my standard train, since I'm not into any real grades yet. Soon the Pacific and then the H10 may be my long trains of choice, but the Atlantic will remain my short train until the A1. The H10 will remain my train for medium and tough grades until the the A1, and then the P-2, though the A1 is still better than the P-2 if I want to run short trains through the tough grades. I don't imagine this being the Age of Steam I'll get the E428 (another ridiculously good train), so these will probably be my trains for the scenario. Oh, wait, the scenario may go on until 1945, so I may add some short Mallard express trains in the flats and then the V2 for longer trains and all trains in medium and tough grades, but most scenarios don't play through the full time, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

PS make sure you're sitting down before trying to decipher the formulas in the more complicated spreadsheet, since you may get dizzy. And it will help if you "Unhide" all the hidden columns, which are the numerical equivalents of the characteristic descriptions like "Average", etc. The hidden columns of numbers are just to the right of their corresponding characteristic columns, so that I have some numbers to use in the formulas.

Okay, time to get off the forum and back into the game!!!

[Hawk]

And absolutely, if you think my product is site worthy, go ahead and put it up! I'd be honored!

Yep! I think it's site worthy. Most definitely, but maybe you might want to consider adding a read me text to the zip explaining the sort feature you've set up as well as mentioning the hidden columns. I was wondering where you used the descriptor values. I didn't even notice the missing columns. I even checked some of the formulas but didn't see any reference to the second sheet.
I will say; you've got a much more thorough knowledge of spread-sheets than I do.

Btw, did you notice any of the changes that I made to the climbing ability from the PDF that's already posted? One surprise I had is that while the Challenger and Big Boy Trains were both listed as Mountain Kings, they really only pulled at about half their top speeds when faced with a 6% grade, and in my book, that is only average climbing ability. Compared to a Shay, which still pulls at 90% of its top speed at the 6% grade, these guys are chumps. In my more in depth analysis, it became obvious that neither of these two trains are worth their high costs in any situation. The P-2, E18, F3, U1, EF66, and A1 are all better trains at tough grades (if available...) and the H10 compares pretty good, too, for such an early train.

I haven't compared it to MangusA's pdf.

I was wondering if some of the trains are just plain imbalanced compared with the rest of the field, and how many of these outstanding trains were original to RTIII and how many were added by the community afterwords. It appears that scenario builders can have a lot of fun just deciding what trains to allow, forcing us players to make tough choices.

Did you scroll down to the very bottom of the page at the link I posted in the second post in this thread. You will find jpg's of the engine list that came with the original release? Just click on the image size links below the image to view bigger sizes. You can then save the image to your PC for comparison.

BTW! How did you lock the position of row 2 and column A? I have a couple of spread-sheets I'd like to do that with.

Also; What is the purpose of row 33?

Edit 1: You have a PM.

[low_grade]

Row 33 in the spreadsheet as it's currently sorted is just an empty row that will sit between the last engine currently available and the rest of the list of unavailable engines, to make it easier for me to know when to stop looking down the list when I scroll across to see my results. I just put a value of 0.5 in "Available now?" for that row and left the rest of it empty, and since all the engines will have either a 1 if they're available or a 0 if they're not in this column, this particular row will always sit between the two lists when you sort.

If you look across the column headings, you'll notice they skip a letter just after each column containing characteristics like "Average" or "Fast". That's where the hidden columns are. The hidden columns reference the second sheet with the VLookup function, checking for the numerical value which corresponds to a descriptor. I was just trying to be lazy here, or fancy, I'm not sure, since I could have typed in "Average" and then "50", etc., for all the characteristics and so avoided the use of a second sheet and the VLookup command.

To find the hidden columns, you can just select the whole spreadsheet by clicking the empty box in the top left corner which is in the same row as all the column headings and the same column as all the row names, and then move your cursor over any of the column headings and right click to bring up your options. Look down the list of options and you'll see "Unhide". Click this and the hidden columns will appear. To hide a column, you right click on its column heading and then click on "Hide" from the list of options. You should be able to do this with OpenOffice Calc, since they say it's fully compatible with Excel, but should doesn't mean that you can...

And thanks, I love spreadsheets! And databases... Been playing with them for 20 years or so now.

And yes, a readme.txt, which could be repeated as the "top sheet" in the spreadsheet, would make this monster much more manageable. So I guess before you post it to the site let me have the day to make some adjustments and then I'll repost it here, and I think I'll keep your color scheme for engine types, too!

[low_grade]

Here's my more user friendly zip.

Admin Edit: File deleted. Now available in the Extras section. http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/Tips_Tuts_Utils.htm

[Hawk]

Cool! Looks good.
I'll get that added to the site tonight or tomorrow. Most likely tomorrow.

[WPandP]

I had to hunt around for it, but I recalled doing something similar with a spreadsheet. I never got around to posting it in a public open forum, though, so you (low_grade) would not have seen it.

My purpose was a little different; I wanted to sift through the locomotive list and fit the whole thing into a points-allocation system, in order to come up with a planning tool that would enable me to make new engine mods that were balanced relative to the default engines. I think that my earlier stuff, esp. the Class J 4-8-4, were just too superlative in their stats, because those stats were based on real-world performance without regard to game behavior.

Well, I discovered that, with few exceptions, the given engines do fit into an overall points rating, according to year available. This gave me confidence to develop stats for other custom engines, and I made a little form where you start by providing the year available, and then select options from drop-down lists until you reach a point total that approximates the target total. You can make trade-offs, such as taking on higher maintenance in order to gain better passenger appeal. It's a ton of spreadsheet calculation, sounds like something you'd enjoy!

http://wpandp.com/RRT3/RT3%20Locomotive%20List-MRR.xls

Incidentally, the points values that I derived for each of the engines shows which of them are over-performing and thus really good deals; I'd be interested to know if such point analysis and your analysis come to the same conclusions.

[low_grade]

I can see how that would be useful for when you're designing an engine!

Unfortunately, it looks like we disagree a bit, which is not to say that we don't mostly agree.

Now I don't have a high degree of confidence in these results, but I basically took the totals for the scores I gave each engine and compared that to your scores. My scores vary from 4.6 to 1825, while yours vary considerably less, but still I could see a few places where we clearly disagreed.

Right from the beginning, I gave the Firefly a much higher score than the Norris and the Adler, which your system considered better than the Firefly.

On your scale it looks like I would have given the Class 500 more like a 70 or 75 even, it's way ahead of its class. I would bump the P-2 up to a 72, and the Northern would go down to like a 65.

The E428 would jump way up to an 85 or so, and the GG1 would drop to like 75. The E18 would be like a 90 and the V2 not far behind. The Challenger I would drop way down to like a 65. Big boy also down closer to 70.

Shinkansen I would rate even a little higher, maybe 95-97, and the Deltic I'd jump way up to a 90. The DD40AX I'd drop a little, to 83 or so. The Class 103 is simply amazing and would get like another dozen points, putting it at 105 perhaps. The BR E111 would also move up a lot, to more like 98.

A bunch of the trains at the end of this I'd need to increase your point system to represent, as I'd give the ICE and the DD 080-X like 125s and the E-88 like 135.

Well, only really disagreed on maybe a dozen of the 80 or so trains. Pretty close.

It looks like I don't penalize as much for initial cost, since I figure most of the cost comes from fuel and then maintenance over the life of the train. I also don't give Reliability much consideration, since mostly trains don't break down unless you run them without oil, without cabeese, for like 15 years, or if they have Poor or worse Reliability. Maybe 2 breakdowns a year out of 100 trains is only like a half percent decrease in productivity max.

Of course I also don't factor in Fuel usage or sand usage, since I had no idea such things could be factored in! Where do you find data on that? It would be interesting to see! I always wondered if some trains were using water faster than others.

[Hawk]

This is now available in the Extras section under the Tips, Tutorials, Utilities, etc. section.

http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/rrt3/Xtras/Tips_Tuts_Utils.htm

I've deleted the files in the above posts, since it's on the site now.

[WPandP]

low_grade -

I thought, as I looked it over, that there'd be points of disagreement in there. I played around with weightings to try to get it so that the majority of engines came out with a point value that approximated what their total "should" be based on starting year. So, the points of disagreement seem to indicate that more work needs to be done to get the weightings right. As for fuel and sand usage, that was greyed out because I ended up omitting it as a factor. It would be something that I'd want to include in the Rail Mogul project, which is why I went ahead and created it, but it isn't pertinent to RRT3 engines.

Anyways, I thought you'd appreciate it as a tool! Next time I do an engine mod, I'll revisit this, especially if you can give me some pointers as to how to revise it.

[low_grade]

Glad to when you're getting back to modding.

However, I guess I feel it's just not very meaningful to reduce all the information we have about an engine down to a single number. It's like saying we should only ever use one kind of engine at a time, which of course we sometimes do, but usually we find that different engines are better at the different things we want to do in a scenario.

This actually makes me rethink what I did to compare my analysis to your figures. Instead of just summing all the numbers for each of the 36 situations I look at to get a single total rating for each engine, I would have been better off to just take the maximum of the 36 numbers for the purpose of comparison. Then I wouldn't be penalizing the engines for what they're bad at, I'd be comparing engines by what they're best at, which is how we use them anyway.

[Grandma Ruth]

Wow! This is great, just what I need.