After a quick bit of research, it appears that there are some freight services along the line, which are formed of class 66’s. Freight traffic from newhaven uses the branch line from Lewes and joins into the BLM. Could this be layered on? Because it would be a shame if it didn’t. Apart from services to a quarry and ecw layers , what other freight services are there and will this be included in tsw2, to add to the immersion?
A quick search on realtimetrains shows yards served by the line are: Newhaven Crawley Ardingly (near Haywards Heath) Purley (Engineering sidings nr Crawley) There are also several freights and engineers trains out of Horsham (SouthWest of Crawley) On Friday just gone there were 6 freight movements through Gatwick Airport station Further up the line at East Croydon you get some more movements from Kent and Surrey to the West London yards at Acton, but this is ten movements in the day, several as at Gatwick, but would be quite short hops on the BML itself
Saw these yesterday from a 377 after departing Horsham (forgive the quality, the window were a bit dirty). Would be nice as an interesting, small DLC loco add-on.
Engineering trains would be a great addition as they run everywhere in the south east, out of Horsham and Tonbridge especially it seems https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:C04486/2021-07-08/detailed Horsham - Seaford - Brighton - Eastbourne - Hastings - Eastbourne - Haywards Heath - Norwood Junc. - New Cross - East Croydon - Gatwick - Three Bridges - Horsham Admittedly that's 8½ hours for one trip (at 90mph max) but if that was one multipart scenario I can see it all working the same as some of the US freight routes and it wouldn't take much to figure out what bits can be done on BML and ECW
There's a cement factory just by Purley, be interesting to see if there's going to be a freight job on the game for there.
