Engine Driver Consisting

This post refers to Engine Driver v2.20.59 - JMRI v.12.0

Engine Driver has very much simplified engine consisting. Up until v2.20.57 though it had one missing feature that bothered me and turned off some other model railroaders. That was the application's inability to do what Digitrax calls Universal consisting. That is, before placing an engine in a consist, run it first in the direction you want it to follow in the consist (if it is reversed in the consist it needs to run in reverse first) and then add it to the consist. In older versions of Engine Driver this would not work. In order to get an engine to run in reverse in a consist you had to change its normal direction of travel via CV29 bit 0. Most of the guys I ran with did not want to do that. Why should I have to reprogram an engine to run it backwards in a consist and then have to reprogram it again when I want to run it normally?

Problem solved!! The new version of Engine Driver supports universal consisting and you don't even have to run an engine in the direction it needs to run before consisting it and no CV programming involved! Let's use an example to demonstrate:

We have three locomotives we want to consist - 3120, 3121 and 3123. We want 3123 to run in reverse behind the other two engines.

After opening Engine Driver and connecting to your server, press Loco, punch in 3120 and acquire it. Now Press loco, punch in 3121 and acquire it. Notice the right hand column now has 'Front' listed for each. Now back to the Loco screen, press Loco, punch in 3123 and acquire it. Now press the 'Front' for 3123 and what happens? The 'Front' changes to 'Rear'. Increase the speed of the 3 engine consist now and it works!!!

It doesn't get any easier than that. Thank you Steve Todd.

One thing to watch out for in Preferences is to make sure that under 'Loco Select Preferences' 'Drop Loco Before Acquire' is unchecked. If it's checked you'll never form a consist.

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