...it would be to please, please, please fix the "gapping" on 3rd rail routes, particularly London Commuter. I've seen a few comments on this forum and even saw it mentioned by DadRail that on the 377s you basically never see the line voltage drop even over complex junctions, yet on TSW it happens even on straight bits of rail, and the noise in the cab is awful (the wind down noise that starts over and over even though the sound hasn't had time to "come back"), as well as the jerkiness as the motors stop driving and then pick up again. These trains have a common line from all the pickup shoes, so either that isn't simulated, you aren't actually allowing all the pickup shoes throughout the train length to feed voltage in, or the third rails just aren't quite long enough over all the junctions. I'm fairly sure it's the middle of those three as I've "gapped" while shoes were touching the rails in the external view. Hopefully that makes it easier to fix!
I would imagine they've made it so that only the shoes local to the cab being driven from are active.
While this definitely would deserve improvement, is that really the Nr.1 go-to fix you want? I think there are a bunch of larger problems with the game.
Sure, but right now I play little else than BML and SEHS so fixing gapping is a real quality of life improvement for my gaming. Plus it also leads nice into my phased BML expansion plan https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/my-phased-bml-expansion-plan-suggestion.57557/
Having tried my best to diagnose this without any kind of debug tools etc., I'm now almost convinced that the trains simply aren't "reading" the central pickup shoes - so they have a pickup shoe on all bogies on the leading and trailing vehicles, for a total of 8 for each 4-car unit. Let's imagine these are numbered 1-2-3-4 (because they're paired, one on each side), with 1 and 2 on the front unit and 3 and 4 on the rear unit. Pickup shoe sets 2 and 3 are not being read. I hope this is an "easy" fix for DTG to do. If you want any easy place to test, just run a service out of Brighton on the mainline through Preston Park, it's a mess over there. Any single pickup shoe can provide the line voltage to the whole 4-car unit, so as long as at least one of the 8 shoes is in contact the train should maintain line voltage, even across complex junctions. (Note that the line voltage is not shared between 4-car sets when joined as 8/12-car trains, so if one 4-car set did lose line voltage for some reason, the other 4-car sets would keep driving if you had power selected).
