.
More tickboxes:
I'm beginning to wonder if this is all getting a bit too complex for anyone to follow? There is still a long way to go.
These new tickboxes enable the individual chairs on the selected timber to be switch on and off. There can only ever be 4 chairs belonging to a single timber, numbered 1 to 4 across from the MS end. If more chairs are needed on a long timber, they must be supplied from another (hidden) timber, usually one on a different template.
Why do we need all this? Well consider an ordinary crossover in Templot before the experimental chairing:
Templot has been in the habit of omitting some of the crossing timbers in a crossover, leaving a convenient space for you to extend long timbers across from the opposite turnout, and then tidy up the timber conflicts with some shoving.
Which works fine until you switch the experimental chairing on:
As you can see, that leaves the extended timbers with chairs missing, because those rails are not part of the same template.
To get all the chairs along all the rails, we need to generate the full set of crossing timbers without leaving any space:
Which generates the missing chairs -- but also a lot more which we don't need. Plus some conflicting timbers.
The answer is to use those new tickboxes to remove the unwanted chairs. The wanted chairs can then have their generating timber hidden (
hide timber outline button), before being slid along the rails into position over the long timbers. A hidden timber can be selected by clicking its number, in the same way as a visible timber.
This is different from
omitting a timber, which removes the timber
and its chairs from the template, until you click
restore timber.
Here I am sliding the two chairs belonging the hidden sleeper A1 into position over the long timber:
And the final result is:
As you can see there is still a long way to go. The special crossing chairs (marked in red) and the check rail chairs (in green) will be automatically generated and positioned by Templot (hopefully). Also the conflicting Y chairs (in orange).
However the conflicting yellow chairs are likely to need a human eyeball and will need to be "heaved" manually. That's because they might be on two different templates. In each case one of them, or maybe both, will need to be changed from an S1 to an L1 or M1 bridge chair.
Likewise if any adjustments are made to the check rail lengths, as in a tandem, the check rail chairs will need to be changed accordingly.
It seems a lot of work, just for an ordinary crossover, but hopefully it will be fairly quick with practice. I will try to provide a video tutorial once it is all working.
Here is the 3D CAD view:
The sockets for the special chairs are still a mess, but you can see that the long timbers have more than 4 chairs -- some of their own, and some captured from hidden timbers on other templates.
cheers,
Martin.