Just had a superb run, Chinley (oh what a wonderful Station that used to be) to Matlock. Got the hang of the Jubilee class now. Run was on time. Had the cut off at 18 most of the time, made the grades perfect ok, Had to turn off Dynamic Weather, yesterday tried with it and rained all the way FPS down to 3! some times. Enjoyable how it should be. I used to fire Jubilees back in the 1950/60's pleasure to take the shovel again.
It’s just a crying shame that DTG turned their backs on any further steam traction in the game. PFR is a very nice run though.
I do the love the Route. It's got some beautiful scenery and it's just made so well! Hopefully steam will get a reprieve some day!
Lukas has been teasing German steam for a while so who knows… we might get more steam someday from TSG. Was on a German interview around the release of TSW6. Can’t find it now. But also see this chat, one of the final posts is a chat from Discord: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/voice-on-the-karwendel-railway-mittenwaldbahn.93640/
It is a lovely route but not long enough. I very often insert a free roam consist into a timetable run, with a 4F on passenger stopping duties.
Plus it was a bit of a cheek by DTG not running the 8 miles or so down into Derby, finishing at Ambergate instead. But for how steam is in TSW, I prefer driving on this route to dreary SoS.
what really surprised me is how no modders jumped on the routes to bring them to life, like what happened with other routes and enhanced timetables. if even modders avoided the routes, maybe thats very telling of the general interest in them. I love both of them, but Peak Forest is just utterly lush
I find PFR route a lot more pleasing visually, but it could just be SOS is rather boring because it iwas in real life. Wasn't around in the 50s/60s to see it. =-) PFR is just a more interesting drive of the two for me. The 104 was set to reinvigorate that route with some added timetable, and early diesels have been suggested as a way to salvage it, but no one has taken up the project.
I have half an extra paths mod built with a view to bringing most of the sidings into life and creating some BR Blue scenarios. The trouble is the changes to the TSW versions (4 to 5 to 6) have messed up my Unofficial Editor so I'm not sure if this can be completed. (Will try and finish this in TSW4 first and the see if it just transfers across to TSW5 and 6.
I think both sos and pf should have come with diesel and steam. Even if dtg just did a few external changes to traction already in the game. If SOS was set a couple of years later it would have been much better.
Exactly. Like a lot of other games, they suffered from lack of infrastructure (in this case rolling stock.) DCS is similar in that it's a flight simulator but is often "sand box" with stuff farmed out to third parties, so it's whatever each company feels like making. Thus, like TSW it's a hodge-podge. They released a WW 2 Pacific map...with nothing to go on it for example, and a company made a cool Russian plane that was too new and had no map to go on. TSW is kind of the same. We get different eras up and down the WCML because people just felt like doing different eras. People complain, but that's what the "open world" style of third parties does. It gives them the choice. Now I see WHY TSW does that (to get more produced since their own studio is pretty small) but the tradeoff is more diversity and product with lower integration or "vision" for the greater whole. The whole "steam" thing suffered as a result. Not because it's "third party" per se but because they didn't develop the infrastructure (rolling stock) to support it. The other routes benefit from a ton of "layers" to improve the fullness of the timetables. For some reason SOS and PFR lacked any of those layers because they never bothered adding any of the early diesel content. Now granted, not everything WOULD "fit" on those routes, but with layers you can throw on a lot of "sort of fits" stuff that would have given the option of more usage of the route and filling the very barren timetables. The Class 8, Class 20, Class 101, etc.... they'd have worked fine just to put more on the rails. SOS and PFR were very isolated from the rest of the game and withered on the vine. That integration was key because they already had a strike against them in being a less popular overall era for most (MOST not all) players. So, they needed more tie in to succeed. As much as people complain about the "realism" of the steam part, I think the lack of "realism" by ignoring the appropriate diesel traction at the time was a far larger reason for its failure.
My thoughts exactly. Look at Crewe not that long after 1958. The route would be really busy with stock we already or now have in tsw. Dtg have made a couple of routes that just don't make sense. Like the suffragette line, it just feels so empty. You arrive at barking expecting it to be really busy and it's like all trains have been cancelled. On the other hand they could have done either section of windrush and had quite a busy route. I know people just wanna drive trains and don't care that 90%of the traffic is missing but dtg could try and make routes that give you the feel of the railway they represent. Maybe I just expect too much.
PFR has some suitable diesel stock, the 08, 101, 20 (did they really venture that way back then?), 37 (same question), the 40, 45 and 47. Of course it needs a rat and everything will need slathers of green paint (I'm a blue boy myself but will begrudgingly accept green). Sadly though there is no incentive for a developer to do all of the above and make a new diesel/steam crossover era timetable and sadly the complexities of the editor in general scare most folks off except the hardened users, who are still put off on said route. It is a crying shame though, it is a beautiful route and doesn't need much if anything by way of an enhancement pack like NTP/TVL/BML/WCL/WCMLS did.
I tried my best to make a timetable for pf but like you say, the editor is not user friendly. If a modder would take on the job name your price!
Agreed. It's rather low hanging fruit to just throw some existing stock into a new timetable with some liveries (blue to green) compared to making a whole new route. It would likewise be a lower price than a whole new route. Something like a Skyhook pack in complexity and cost. I can see it being a nice smaller project for a third party. It'd sell pretty decent, even if for just some "green" liveries and for people who bought the PFR/SOS originally.
The line could do with a remaster, either inhouse or modders. I think the limit for SOS was hardware the game was being aimed at. most consoles, and PCs at the time were limited to RAM. nowadays, especially on PC we have 32 - 64GB of RAM. We can handle a lot of traffic assets from what should have been busy stations and sidings. The new routes that are being released show this. They are hecking busy. Now imagine that traffic density at rush hour at Liverpool Lime and we can only imagine how good it could have been (or still could be).
