Railroad Network Modeling Part 2

[thomasbales]

First of all, thanks for all the help modeling U-turns on the rail that I have been tenaciously working on. The system is working along with specific turn policies that allow our vehicles to hop the mains at switch points while continuing forward until a designated turnaround point.

The next task (the next to the last one) is too look a historical train counts on each of main lines and set a cost value to simulate traversing a line if you are traveling against the flow of traffic. To clarify, if a main line's (rail) traffic has a tendency to travel more east then west - if I route a vehicle that has its next stop west against traffic is should perhaps move at 60-70% normal speed.

Is there a way to model this restriction? Meaning, on the same section of rail the speed should have a different speed value (hours, days, or minutes to traverse)  base on whether it is a to-from or a from-to (ie east-west or west-east direction).

I know I may not have been clear enough on the question, but essentially I am trying to model routes with or against the flow of historical traffic in network analyst. Also, this is a standard network dataset not a geometric one.

Thanks,

Tom

[MelindaMorang · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas.  Good news!  This should be easy to do.

When you're setting up your cost attribute, in the Evaluators dialog, you should see a column called Direction, and there should be two entries for each source feature class for your network, From-To and To-From.  This is where you can have the network calculate a different cost depending on the direction of travel.

Note: You need to make sure the direction of digitization for your rail line edges is consistent.  If From-To isn't consistently East-West (or vice-versa), then you're going to get funky answers.  I believe there's a flip tool in the Editing toolbox, so you might end up having to flip some lines.