March Roadmap

It is pricey, but they’re the only provider that can do anything like that and if you live in the sticks and have no other option it’s an absolute Godsend tbh.

 

So your point is more people enjoy driving games than playing train games?

That basically all that proves and I already knew that. Flight Sims and Driving Sims have more players than Train sims as there is more interest in them than trains.

And I can honestly say that flying a plane or driving a semi truck is alot more complicated than driving a train.

All.you do is speed up and slow down. There ia no turning.

And also ETS2 is not on console..yet. so times that number by 3 to get a more accurate number fornTSW as there are more console players than PC. And some PC are on Epic as well. So its not an accurate depiction.

 

Can you actually elaborate on what you mean by this?

You are significantly overestimating the degree of effort and computing power hitboxes require!

 

Okay. Not 1,100 people online, but ~5,000 across all platforms. The difference with ETS is still huge.

 

They have a lot more than 50,000 customers. Those Steam charts show how many players are playing at any one time. 50,000 is just the peak concurrent players that day.

 

And driving games are way more popular than train games its a different demographic.

My brother plays ETCS and ATS but he could care less about trains. He thinks they are too simple.

 

That's right. The audience is much larger, and creating content is much easier.

It's funny, but training to become a train driver takes several years, not much shorter than training to become an airplane pilot. But hey, to each his own. Can you really blame these people?

 

Depends on the route you take to do both.

Fast track for a pilot is 2 years.
An apprenticeship for a train driver is 2 years.

While yes you can become a qualified train driver in 12 months, depending on who you work for and the route requirements, it can be 18 months as a norm.

 

Also has one of the longest and intense role applications aswell

 

What short terms... In our country, the minimum training period is about five years at a railway university. Yes, they're now starting to reduce the training period to two years due to the driver shortage. You can get a truck driving license in just a few months.

 

Sounds like it's an over complicated process.

 

Getting a truck driving licence or even a PSV licence is so much easier than being signed-off to drive a train. My brother-in-law quit his job as a prison guard and joined the main bus company in his city as a trainee driver, within a year he'd been a driver and had been promoted to an Inspector.

Road vehicle drivers don't also have to obtain the modern equivalent of what was the Trackside Safety Certificate, learn rudimentary fault rectification, customer services training, route knowledge training and traction type training. And each has to be maintained with a mixture of refresher courses, updates to rules/standards and a limit (I think it's still 6 months) to how long you can go without driving a route or traction type. I was shocked when my Bro-in-law said he didn't get route learning training on the buses, he would frequently go out in his car to learn a route in his own time, then mark them in his trusty A-Z map.

It is a complicated process, but a review of railway journals from the 1960s reveals a near weekly incident on the network that could have cost lives. Nowadays, thankfully, we often make it through a year without there being a newsworthy mass-casualty event involving a train here in the UK.

 

Well, the more relevant comparison is air travel, if it is the case that rail driver training takes much longer than pilot training...

 

Indeed. The two roles are incomparable, pilot training doesn't start with big jet planes, you have to slowly work your way up from single engine craft then you have to be no.2 in the cabin effectively working under the captain. It can take up to a decade to make it to the point where you're the Captain. So train driver training doesn't take anywhere near the same time to reach the point where you're in charge of a mode of transport.

The time it took me to be able to operate a study level EMU in TSW compared to a study-level passenger aircraft in MSFS 24 is mind blowing. I've been flying (virtually) for 6 years and I still couldn't tell you what 60% of the buttons and switches in an Airbus A320 are for.

The natural skills and the training needed to be a competent jet pilot are off the scale compared to pretty much any other occupation, let alone other forms of transport.

 

There's a bit of that, but true, not to the same extent.
It depends on the network. The RATP are a real pain in the neck, for example.

 

Not if you go into the fast track schemes at some of the commercial airlines. Easyjet stick pilots in their simulators with minimal flying time in actual aircraft until they go out and start doing line training.

 

Do you think we'll finally see the Scotrail HST this time?