Goods vanish from station without a trace?

[lakehaze]

I have goods simply vanishing from some of my platforms.  Running Simutrans Experimental pak128.Brittain.

I ship wool from a sheep farm by truck, train, ship, train, truck to a textile mill.  When the final train drops off its 178 bags of wool, the final truck makes one delivery and on its second pickup, all the wool vanishes, leaving the truck and station empty.  I think this is happening at a few stations, but it's hard to catch.

Does wool have some sort of expiration date?  Is the shipping route so long that the wool evaporates?

If not, is it a glitch?  I've included my save file in case you want to check it out yourself.  The station where the wool goes missing is: "Highwich Whitegate Railway Station", should be centered on file load.
http://www.filefactory.com/file/ce33866/n/Britain-go8.sve

Thanks for the help

[jamespetts]

Hmm - looking at your map, you have a train bringing 192 bags of wool to the station, and then one lorry with a capacity of 14 taking it from the station to the factory; at that rate, it'll take a long time to move all the wool! This is significant, because all goods with a speed bonus rating of > 0% have a maximum waiting time. This maximum waiting time depends to some extent on a value set in simuconf.tab, but also on the length of the next step in their journey (goods/passengers will wait less time to board a convoy for a short journey than for a long one. What is happening, I think, is that your wool is being discarded because it has had to wait too long for the lorry.

In the next version, there are some slight changes to this system, which means that goods will wait a lot longer before being discarded before short journeys (they will always wait at least 1/12th of the maximum waiting time, no matter how short the next journey). The refunds mechanism has also been fixed: previously, it was not calculating refunds correctly, such that the amounts were usually too low (and often much too low or even zero). From 10.2 onwards, you will be able to see clearly in the refunds graph when goods/passengers are being discarded due to excess waiting times.

To make your network more efficient, you might consider (1) adding some more lorries to the Whitegate - Coatfield Textile Mill run, and (2) setting them to wait for full load at Whitegate so that they do not run uselessly between factory and station when there is no wool at the station.

I hope that this helps!

[lakehaze]

So goods are discarded after a certain amount of time?  I didn't know that.  Is it based on age since production, or predicted wait time?  Is it because of the long route before that station, or the long wait predicted on the next leg?

I had several reasons for using a single small truck.  Mostly to do with the rate of wool arrival.  It's pretty slow, just comes in massive chunks because of the sea travel. I also just wanted to get the line running so I could gauge the rate of delivery between all the legs of related materials (coal, steel, planks, furniture).  In this game, I've been trying to keep as few vehicles waiting for pickup as possible.  Even though SimExp isn't actually charging me for monthly maintenance, it feels more realistic to not have vehicles in waiting.  I think my setup would evolve to be pretty effecient, with the nominal number of trucks never waiting, but it seems that this discard feature won't let me do that.  I'll try adding more trucks, and waiting lanes, to reduce the waiting time at that station.

What I don't understand is why the wool is so happy to wait so long at the sheep farm (same small truck setup), station 1 (long train round trip), harbor (sometimes a multi-month wait for the ship to return), and harbor/station 3 (a multi-role train that delivers other goods before returning for the wool), but it won't wait for that last truck to run it's short leg, possibly the shortest wait time on it's trip.  Very anti-intuitive at the least.

It certainly would run a lot smoother if I linked everything with rail lines, but I specifically picked a map with the most continental separation I could find.  Maybe I'm misusing the game.  In fact, I'd like it if it was easier to set up island/continent maps.  It took over two dozen starts to get a map with separate populated continents.

[jamespetts]

Goods are discarded if their actual waiting time exceeds a maximum waiting time. The maximum waiting time is the lesser of (1) a maximum value set in simuconf.tab; or (2) thrice the anticipated journey time for the next journey leg. In the latest version, 10.2, which was released yesterday (I recommend that you download it, since it fixes a number of bugs) this has been altered slightly, so that (2) becomes the greater of (a) thrice the anticipated journey time; or (b) 1/12th the maximum wait time. The maximum wait time is set rather high, so 1/12th of that is still quite a large figure. Try 10.2, and see how you get on.

[Carl]

Just wanted to give a big thumbs up to the 10.2 change on this (at least in theory; I haven't tried it out yet). The previous behaviour (which I think was "thrice journey time for next leg of journey") led to huge amounts of discarded passengers on short inner-city routes, even when those routes run frequently and regularly.

[lakehaze]

Yeah, the update fixed it.  I'm still just running the one truck and it's working fine now.

I still don't completely understand the 3x predicted leg journey thing.  That can only be put into effect if the delivery vehicle is stuck, right?  So if the delivery vehicle is delayed 3x it's normal round trip time, then the goods are discarded, right?  But as long as the vehicle is running as expected, even if it is only 14t a year (ex: single cross continent truck), the vehicle should always return within 3x the expected trip time(3 years), no?

And the hard-coded maximum value, that implies that if the delivery route is too long, the goods will be discarded simply because they've been en route for

• years, regardless of how many legs, right?

[jamespetts]

Lakehaze,

almost but not quite. Goods are discarded when they have been waiting too long, not when they have been travelling too long. Their previous travel time is not taken into account: the clock is reset every time that they are picked up and dropped off and have to start waiting again. Also, it does not necessarily need convoys to get stuck for the 3x travelling time to come into force: it might be that there is insufficient capacity on the line, so that the goods cannot board the first or second convoys to arrive (or first, second, third, fourth, fifth and so on), so they end up waiting for a very long time indeed even if there is a regular service. This can be so particularly where the previous transport link has more capacity than the subsequent link. In Simutrans-Standard, this can result in an enormous and theoretically infinite build up of goods and passengers at transfer stations: it has been known for transfer stations to accumulate many tens of thousands of passengers in Simutrans-Standard games for this reason. The solution latterly implemented in Standard was for goods/passengers not to board in the first place if a transfer halt was overcrowded: but this created impenetrable deadlocks and did not model real life behaviour accurately.

[prissi]

Standard has also a setting to just not create such passengers in the first place.