Advanced Routing: Path Selector

August 25, 2020

If sometimes your trains take an unexpected route… The Path Selector tool is here to help!

The Path Selector tool is great when you need to finely tune your routes, or when you want to enable or disable certain paths.

To open it, use the clipboard icon that appears on the left of the screen when you are in routing mode:

How can I use it?

Imagine this situation: The town of Hantown has two coal mines.

You want to connect the first platform of Hantown station to the first coal mine. Everything works fine. The router find a single route from A to B:

Now you want to connect the second platform to the second Coal mine, and reuse the previous track for the return:

Notice how the return path is split just before Hantown station. This is because the return path is shared and is connected to the two platforms.

Now you create a route from Hantown station to the second coal mine.

But wait a minute! Something weird happens:

A first path (dark blue) is correctly going from the second platform to the coal mine, but a second path (light blue) is also going from the first platform to the coal mine.

This is actually normal: the router makes its best effort to find all the possible paths between the two stations, and it actually found a valid path going from the first platform to the second coal mine. This path is valid, even if, for us humans, it seems weird.

A first reaction, is to use an intermediary waypoint on the shortest path:

Damn it! It does not work… The router also found an unexpected path from the first platform to the waypoint B. This path is valid. It takes a long route, and it’s even weirder, but it is valid nonetheless… A train could actually take it.

These unexpected paths always happen when you share tracks between routes.

This is where you can use the Path Selector tool:

Create a route between the two stations. Open the Path Selector tool, click the light blue path on the track to disable it, and voilà! Your train is now only using the dark blue path.