"Am I clear to the station?"

If you're moving, and you press the crew-talk (#2) you should hear that.  If you press AUX1 before #2, you'll hear the alternate one that says you aren't clear.  When you're looking at the CAB2, you'll note that the tower-com and crew-talk keys go dark when you press AUX1, that signifies that you'll get a negative response to a query.

banjoflyer posted:

Read the manual. It usually tells you what dialog is said during a specific set of conditions.

e.g. if the engine is moving or stationary or if a certain amount of time has lapsed since the last dialog. 

The owner's manual says nothing about this dialogue or anything like it--and virtually nothing about any dialogue. As I said, this is an early Legacy engine.

gunrunnerjohn posted:

If you're moving, and you press the crew-talk (#2) you should hear that.  If you press AUX1 before #2, you'll hear the alternate one that says you aren't clear.  When you're looking at the CAB2, you'll note that the tower-com and crew-talk keys go dark when you press AUX1, that signifies that you'll get a negative response to a query.

I have not found any combination of key presses, engine moving vs. stationary, and run time that will get the engineer to ask, "Am I clear to the station?" I have only heard it when using iCab and pressing the CrewTalk dialogue button labeled Clear Inbound.

By the way, this is an engine moving query, i.e., the train is moving and the engineer wants to know if he can pull into the station; and, as far as I know from using iCab, this query has only an affirmative response.

Also, in my experience with early and recent Legacy, AUX1 makes CrewTalk and TowerCom negative only when the engine is stationary.

There is also more to the dialog.  When the train is in motion and you press <Aux1><#2> , this triggers the inbound message.  The tower will respond that its all clear to arrive.  After that message, stop the train and then press <#2>.  You will get the final message - I have arrived and my brakes are set.  This is all part of the round trip dialog which is covered in the manual.

Another fun one I play with is the Emergency Stop message.  While the train is in motion press <#5> or it may be <Aux1><#5>.  The tower will respond that there is an emergency and you must brake now.  Apply the brake (I use the boost/brake button and not the slider) until the train stops.  The engineer will then respond with a message.  Do this a few times as the engineer's message will vary.

It turns out there's a "reason" that:

1) Using the iCab app, you can press the CrewTalk dialogue button labeled Clear Inbound and hear the engineer request clearance to the station, i.e., clearance inbound;

and

2) Using the CAB-2, this same dialogue is absolutely inaccessible.

I learned that this behavior is intentional. The fact is that, yes, there is certain dialogue in Legacy RailSounds, i.e., the engineer requesting clearance inbound, that cannot be triggered from the CAB-2, but only from the iCab app. This is true even with RailSounds that was produced years before the iCab app was created. Yes, this seems extremely curious, but there is a rationale for why this was done--although what that rationale is I don't yet know.

I wish this "hidden" dialogue was available via the CAB-2. I enjoy cab chatter, and this snippet of dialogue is cool.

Keith is correct, this dialog triggering functionality is a value-add, unique to iCab.

I'm working from memory, but here goes: On the original Railsounds products featuring intelligible crew/tower dialog (probably RS5 or RS5.5), there was a slightly different sequence of aux-key, 2 key and 7 key button presses. In that early version, the engineer-first/clear inbound was triggered by aux1, 2 in motion. But a change was introduced for Legacy and that particular phrase was removed from the cab trigger sequence. 

However, the underlying "am I clear inbound?" speech and its corresponding direct dialog trigger command was preserved in all subsequent legacy locomotives specifically to enable future products like iCab. While it is fun to think of these as "hidden" dialog features, they're in plain sight should you review the public Legacy command protocol document. 

During iCab development, we added new buttons to allow triggering that phrase, plus a few others, like "say current speed" and "say fuel level." 

The iCab app offers an improved dialog experience, as it is not constrained by a lack of unused buttons, and iCab dialog buttons can be given clear and descriptive names.

http://www.lionel.com/lcs/LCSproducts/iCab/index.html

Fantastic Rudy, thanks for chiming in and clearing that all up.   Never too old to learn something new.

Rudy,

So good to see you are still on the Forum. Ken and I often get together and talk about out time at ERR. Miss you and hope all is well with you and your family. Would like to get together some time but I don't have your personal email address.

If you're up to it, contact me at: tczephyr@hotmail.com

RAY

Rudy, very interesting explanation of the background of this latent functionality (latent with respect to operating with the CAB-2). Thank you for enlightening us. (And, yes, it's fun to think of this as "hidden" dialogue, sort of like the backmasked lyrics on some Beatles records.)