Locomotives have specific horn signals they issue when starting to move in either forward or reverse
directions. Two medium blasts indicate starting forward movement and three
short blasts indicate starting reverse movement. They also have a stop signal
of one short blast to indicate they are done moving in either direction.
It’s not difficult to add
these signals to any ESU LokSound sound file if you have minimal experience
working with sound slots and sound schedules. I have given several tutorials
for working with these objects such as this one.
This is a little more complicated task than the previous automatic bell project
but again, not too difficult. We’ll use the ESU sound file
S0539-LS5H0DCC-Diesel-EMD-12-645E3-T-V4-R4.esux located here one more time.
The Forward and Reverse Signals
Open the sound file in the LokProgrammer
and go to the sound pane. Double click on an empty sound slot (we’ll use sound
slot 28 this time). Once you have this opened add two containers, one for the
forward horn and one for the reverse horn. Name them Forward Signal and Reverse
Signal respectively. For the forward container add a group of conditions
Function = true, Reverse = false and Requested Speed > 0. For the reverse
container add a group of conditions Function = true and Reverse = true. This
controls the logic of when horn signals sound. All of this is shown in fig 1.
Figure 1 the basic containers
Once inside the containers
the sound files you use will depend on the horn you want for the particular
locomotive you are adding this sound file to. These files are located in the
lower right corner of the sound pane. You can use drag-and-drop to put them in
the states. Now double click on the Forward Signal container. Here you will add
four states in series. First the horn’s init sound followed by the horn’s exit
sound then the init sound again and the exit sound again. This is shown in fig
2.
Figure
2 the forward signal
All horns
have Init and Exit sound files associated with them. Most also have Fast Exit
sounds where you could use the Fast Exit in the first exit state and then the
Exit file in the second one. It’s entirely up to you. The simulator will help
you decide.
Lastly, click
on the Reverse Signal container. Here you will do exactly what you did in the
Forward Signal container except add one more Init and Exit cycle to complete
the three blasts as in fig 3.
Figure
3 the completed Reverse signal
The Stop Signal
For the Stop signal you will need another
sound slot. Use slot 31 for our example. Here we again add a container that
will have the sound file states in it but we will add one additional state to the
slot and this is the horn delay shown in fig 3. It uses the silence.wav file
which is included in all sound projects which gives a short delay from the
engine stopping to the horn sounding.
Figure 4 the horn delay
The Stop Signal itself
consists of a single init/exit horn sequence as we did in fig 3.
When mapping these to a
function put both sound slots on the same function and be sure to add the Drive signal to the function you choose (this is
critical). The author usually uses function 3 due to not using the coupler
function, again, your choice. See fig 5.
Figure 5 function mapping
Thanks to Ted Wentz on the
groups.io ESU Forum for first presenting this sound mapping.
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