Selective Interchanges

Selective Interchanges

A vanilla Railroader interchange is generic — cars appear and disappear. A Toolshed selective interchange turns that same track into a specific off-map industry or connecting railroad, with traffic that makes sense for what it represents.

The worked example is the Ocona-Lufty RR at Smokemont behaving like an off-map sawmill: empty flats and boxcars are ordered in, occasional loaded building-supplies cars are delivered to the mill, the cars go off map, and loaded lumber and poles return at the same interchange to be waybilled onward.

For Players

You do not configure these — route packages do. What you notice is that an interchange starts asking for particular cars and returning particular loads, instead of accepting anything.

If an interchange is behaving oddly, the route package that configured it is where the problem lives. Include the route name in any report.

Authoring

Config Location

Put a config file in either place inside your mod folder:

• ToolshedSelectiveInterchanges.json at the mod folder root
• any .json file inside a SelectiveInterchanges folder

Toolshed scans installed mod folders and applies matching definitions after the game has created the industries.

The Traffic Model

A selective interchange has four independent traffic types. They compose — use only the ones your scenario needs.

Field	Purpose
emptyCarRequests	Ask for empty cars to send to the off-map operation
inboundLoads	Accept loaded supplies the off-map operation consumes
purchaseLoads	Create vanilla buy/import loaders for loads the railroad can purchase
outboundRoutes	Create loaded-car orders at the interchange for off-map production returning

Two details worth getting right:

emptyCarRequests needs an origin. For interchange-to-interchange traffic, set originWeights or another origin field so the empties spawn at the active external interchange rather than at the off-map interchange itself. Without it the cars appear where they are going, which is not what you want.

inboundLoads only acts when served. By default Toolshed handles those cars only when the interchange is actually being served, so cars sitting on the interchange track are not removed by the normal industry tick.

purchaseLoads is for buyable goods only. Use it for what the railroad can buy from the connecting railroad — Ocona-Lufty logs for Ravensford, in the worked example. Do not put normal mill production here unless it genuinely should be purchasable; production that returns loaded belongs in outboundRoutes.

Reference

• ../Examples/selective-interchange-readme.md — the full field reference and a minimal working example
• ../Examples/KingG.Appalachian-Railway.ToolshedSelectiveInterchanges.json — a complete real configuration

There is also a legacy RailLoader build of this feature in RailLoaderSelectiveInterchanges/ for pre-FUSE installs.

Related

• Getting Started
• Service Facilities

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Mirrored from docs/SELECTIVE_INTERCHANGES.md - edit the repository copy.