What is with the lack of shunting? Being able to shunt into different sidings and even do setback moves into different station platforms would be awesome.
Which route? I like shunting occasionally but the Sand Patch Grade Journey had me shunting for what felt like 20 hours before I got to drive a train along the route. Seems like a lot of shunting in Clinchfield as well. There was also a little bit of shunting passenger coaches in West Somerset
Peninsula Corridor with the MP15 adds shunting / switching. Leeds Manchester with the Heavy Freight pack will have you shunting in the 08. The upcoming Dresden Riesa has shunting in the 363. Ruhr Sieg Nord with the 363 DLC is all about all kinds of shunting. Sand Patch Grade had a whole service mode upgrade to add a ton of shunting / switching at Cumberland. Main Spessart Bahn's BR 204 addon gives that route some shunting. Tees Valley Line has some shunting using its 08. Clinchfield has tons of it That's all I can think of off the top of my head - plenty of it, it's something I love playing!
The problem with switching/shunting in TSW2 is that there are far too many instances of long, tedious and down right unnecessary moves. For example, I once ran a switching service at Cumberland (SPG) and the game ordered me to couple up four different cuts of car that would make up a train to depart later in the day, located at several different locations around the yard. Instead of coupling them all up at once, which would have been prototypical, I had to make numerous back and forth movements picking up one cut at a time, coupling it to the rest and then running back light to the next cut and repeating this until all the cuts of cars were together.
Happy to receive feedback that helps us improve the tasks! Send me some details of what you think can be improved, by all means.
Have to say that's reality I believe. You do not always just put a set together, that you might want your train in a certain order. You also do not always drag a train about until you add the last set. You can go get each section and create one long train in one siding and then leave from there. I really like doing shunting, than running along from place to place. Call me Weird
True. The railroad does indeed switch cars into a specific order and into certain places in the train consist, but when they do this they try their best to make the process as efficient as possible, minimizing the amount of moves it takes to create a train because the more running around you do, the more fuel you use and you end up putting a lot more wear and tear on the equipment than you need to.
You forget half of it: WSR has a lot of run arounds and station shunting. RSN also has shunting tasks in a number of mainline drives. Boston Sprinter has depot rides (does this count as shunting?) NTP has some shunting activities as well, though not so much. Arosa Linie has loads of shunting near the line ends and a nice freight scenario. Cane Creek has shunting at all major locations. I probably forgot some. But we love to have more of this.
There could be a whole Route DLC around shunting, really. It's extremely fun. The setting could be a large yard like Barstow, CA or North Platte, NE.
And don't forget that if you can get your job done more quickly, you have longer to drink your tea. Where I think steam would suffer on TSW2 is that shunting already feels more laborious than it should be on a number of routes. SPG is the worst of the routes I have in this respect, but a number of the British routes have quite innefficient manouvres as well. With steam this will be even worse because the further back in time you go, the looser heath and safety regulations become, and the more common things like this are: A world away from shunting on TSW.
However, if the train gets too long then it makes reversing moves difficult or impossible, because of the distance required to clear switches (while not interfering with other traffic); and there's a limit to what a pair of GP38s can drag around.