In addition to Ken Terrell's tests of a 28-car Talgo train, Genya Zaytman ran six trains simultaneously (see attached picture). Running six trains at a time provided six times the problems of running one train. There were two notable problems:

1) Our long-neglected cabooses (and observation cars) exhibited a number of derailment, spontaneous uncoupling, and lack-of-occupancy problems.

2) A recently-added feature disables the System3 auto-stop-on-red feature if the operator changes any control settings, on the assumption that the operator is in full control of the train. Unfortunately, the presence of very short blocks and the aforementioned caboose problems can combine to create a number of rear-end collisions.

James Knight experimented with a really cool feature - the addition of a name tag to the dispatcher's display. With this feature, each train shown on the dispatcher's display has a train name tag ("Burr", "Amtrak", etc) associated with the head end of the red line on the display that indicates a powered train moving about the layout. This feature is in addition to the software cab data displays that indicate train name, block location, signal, etc. (see http://tmrc.mit.edu/sys3/scab/scabops.html)

John E. McNamara