Just had a random thought pop in my head, now we are getting Birmingham new street as a hub I wonder if its theoretically possible to use either a route from new street or the Chiltern route from Moor St and join the Birmingham route with the GWR somewhere, maybe Reading?
We really don't know what the route building or joining mechanisms of the closely guarded UE4 TSW editor are. Whether it's as easy as merging two routes in Trainz (you just trim the edges until they match) or TSC where both routes must have the same geographic origin or maybe it's not possible at all. What we do know is that SEHS was extended so that doesn't rule out the possibility. However the sad fact is, that's the only route DTG have done it for, everything else seems to be a "burner" route - fire and forget. They can't even go back in and patch existing routes such as BML and the mess that is Reigate or the missing track at Redhill.
Sehs is not really the same as merging. It was rebuilt with more miles of track. The timetable was remade, etc. It's not merged routes. I would expect route mergers to be more complicated. The game would first have to know which route you have installed. 1, or the other or both so you would need 3 timetables if they ran services between each other. And it would have to work without breaking the game, however that is possible. None of the routes right now aren't worth being merged since you either need additional track or they are in different eras or they don't run services between each other.
Yes I know it was or more likely existed already on a backup server somewhere after being cut back gor initial release, just needing the finishing touches to the missing bits for 2.0. Anyhow as said, DTG seem disinterested in extending any of the existing routes and the question re BCC being the start of so ething bigger has yet to be answered.
I hope they go down the route of TSC (no pun intended) and have all the routes connect with each other without having to go through a loading screen
It's the same as TSC. Extensions (or route merging) ain't happening anytime near term I reckon. It's pretty clear though it's a oddball case, even if they do extensions it ain't gonna be anything like how they did it here. SEHS was behind TSW3, so while technically free it was still generating revenue for them in a roundabout way. But DTG can't do that sort of thing regularly, and they aren't gonna make a 40 mile extension and then make it free to existing owners with no strings attached. And if they can't do that then they also can't completely replace a old route with the extended version like they did with SEHS either.
SEHS didn't exist in this form, it existed in the form that was released, there was nothing extra. We simply opened it up and started adding more track and so forth to it as you'd expect. It was a decent sized route project in the end - but meant that core got a 90 mile UK route in total, not a 30 or so mile one as it would have otherwise. Whether Birmingham is the start of something new or not is not going to be discussed in the same way as we don't talk about upcoming projects until the appropriate time. All I'll say is, we don't have any new magic extension technology yet so, nothing's really different here to any other route. Matt.
Thanks for clearing up my misconception! And yes, sure I'm not the only one hoping that having Birmingham as a central hub will lead to something magnificent a year or two down the road.
I think once extensions are available it’ll be a tremendous asset. It’d be so cool to just hop onto a 313 and enter East Coastway after going from Victoria to Brighton, or to walk out from Paddington underground station and immediately get to play GWE.
Yea, it would be so cool. Let's hope they plan to implement this in the future. Maybe it will come with TSW4?
I agree and if you look at HRR Duisburg Hbf it can share a grid with a Duisburg Oberhausen Utrecht route or Aachen Mönchengladbach Duisburg routes