ERTMS, ECTS, PZB, LZB, etc

The current state in RW is this.

• You can have pointwise transmission of information from track infrastructure ("signals" in RW) to trains.
• You cannot have continuous transmission of information from track infrastructure to trains.
• What you do with the information in the train depends on the engine script.
• There is only one custom message with one parameter for all forms of information transformation from track to train.
• There is no way to transfer information from train to signals (or other track infrastructure).

The resulting situation is this.

Pointwise transmission: The default signals implement a simplified version PZB which just implements the momentary speed check, not the continuous one. They also implemented one TPWS which acts as train stop and speed sensor alternately. Dave (davveb at UKTS) is working on some engine scripts to get us further here.

Continuous transmission: No possible, because signal only talk to trains when they are no more than 100m from the track link. This means that if you were determined to have it now, you would need to place transmitter objects every 200m on the route. RSC are positively aware of the issue, and have a very long list of things to do.

Of course, there is nothing like wireless communication at all in RW, such as ERTMS 2 or US dispatching via radio, or UK electronic token systems. This looks to me like a bit more advanced than the continuous trackbound transmission in terms of software redesign (just my guess).

On a sidenote, RSC announced that wagons can have Lua scripts, too, now, but documentation on the API is not yet available.

Whether we end up with an international standard matching ERTMS or whatever these organisations call themselves today depends on whether someone will implement it. An interesting factor here is also standardisation within the community. If RSC insist on squeezing all the information through this one custom message, we will need some community standard like this unified track pieces database for MSTS.

At the same time, our dreams are limited by the fact that merging of routes is not supported in RW, which means that for long, international routes, building them will be a project of its own (maybe reusing scenery items), and this route will have its own signalling, where you can rule out conflicts between implementations by adapting the scripts.