11–20 of 51 posts
It doesn't work out in all cases, but in areas where it does it silently moves society forward!
The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency.
But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building and open sourcing something like this, I would love to see a video of it in use.
[EDIT]: I skimmed through the documentation, and I haven't found anything pertaining to monte carlo simulation of a complex railway system subject to external perturbations, as in: throw a bunch of unexpected events (accidents, breakdowns, blockages, late trains from a neighboring country entering the system, etc...) and see how well the whole network's efficiency holds under such disturbances. Maybe I am misunderstanding the purpose of the system.
[EDIT 2]: OK, found something. Such a "how well does the network do under perturbation" is not part of the feature set yet but seemed to be in the cards. From [1], in section "Operations studies / Planned features include", I read: "automated timetable robustness assessment using stochastic simulation".
[1]https://osrd.fr/en/about/use-case/#%C3%A9tudes-dexploitation
This looks like a serious tool for real professionals to use. Cool! I wish they had some screenshots or videos of the process. In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/ Or several more: https://gith…
Thanks for the links, I've just discovered Mashinky [1], which looks like OpenTTD with amazing graphics. So cool! [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/
I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France. The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency. But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building…
This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain.
Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes.
And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network.
No, I'm not French at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the links, I've just discovered Mashinky [1], which looks like OpenTTD with amazing graphics. So cool! [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/598960/Mashinky/
Whoa... this game looks realistic at first glance, with locomotives and carriages modeled on real-world counterparts, but when watching the demo video, the railfan in me immediately starts screaming "No! This is all wrong !" - the track grades are much too steep, the curves much too tight, and that one scene where two freight trains almost collide and then one of them stops dead with a few meters distance to the othe…
I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France. The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency. But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building…
Seriously... This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain. Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes. And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network. No, I'm not French at all.
I don't think we're talking about the same country here.
Are you a regular user ?
"Comparatively" ?
Sure, if you compare it to the US train network or to Uganda's ... "comparatively", you can always find something to compare to that makes you look excellent.
I know I don't understand the domain at all , but I'm surprised that in this day and age you'd want a distributed system to do railway design. What aspect of the problem makes it unsuitable for running in a single process?
EDIT: The goals of OSRD include realtime cooperation between multiple entities, including timetabling and planning on short term. Thus somewhat more complex application that is "multiplayer".
Part of the issue is that desktop application delivery can be troublesome, logistic wise (especially now with various cross-platform environments dying off), so if you want to serve as wide group as possible with minimal logistical hassle, web might be the way.
Then you might end up building it multiprocess because it's not like you have a monolith once you have complex browser-side state...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously... This is like not trusting the cooking book of an American chef because America has poor food quality. Or British chef in Britain. Individuals' talents are not bound by their countries' failures and successes. And comparatively the French train network is excellent, and faster than the Swiss network. No, I'm not French at all.
> And comparatively the French train network is excellent I don't think we're talking about the same country here. Are you a regular user ? "Comparatively" ? Sure, if you compare it to the US train network or to Uganda's ... "comparatively", you can always find something to compare to that makes you look excellent.
> Are you a regular user ?
Not OP, but I am. The French railway system suffers from a few faults (like the fact that it's Paris first, or not enough capacity on some routes, especially around popular times like Friday afternoon), but is otherwise extremely good. There's very fast coverage between all big cities aligned to Paris (so Lille - Lyon - Marseille is super fast, but mostly because they are destinations linked to Paris); Marseille - Bordeaux is slow because it isn't aligned to Paris, and has to pass through bad terrain in the middle of nowhere).
In terms of coverage of % of the population with regional or high speed rail, or hell, low cost low or high speed rail, it's among the best in the world. It's only serious challengers are Spain, Italy, Japan, China.
I would have felt a tad better if such tool had originated in Switzerland rather than France. The railway system in Switzerland is far, far more reliable, far more central to the Swiss economy and proportionally (Switzerland is smaller than France) services much more of the country in terms of both geographical reach and service frequency. But ... credit where credit is due, kudos indeed to the Frenchies for building…
[1]: https://github.com/SchweizerischeBundesbahnen/netzgrafik-edi...
Very cool! How hard is it to use though for someone without a real technical skill set ?
The README contains instructions to start OSRD with docker-compose, if you want to try it out. Would be nice to have a public demo instance for sure!