Route Peak Forest Railway: Ambergate – Chinley & Buxton Feedback Thread

I agree, except the situation where the game physics make it unachievable. In that case then surely something has to give?

I’d much rather see the physics tuned to the timetable than the other way around however. I guess that’s why we’ve ended up with multiple versions of the same loco, because the different physics will break the timetable.

 

One answer is to turn the driver assist off..? Must admit I’ve not had that message about cutoff but then I’m fairly conservative about winding it back. Most times I don’t even go to full forward to start, the locos are so overpowered you can usually start in 60% without any trouble. Despite the improvements steam physics are still pretty basic. You shouldn’t need to run with the large injector open, in fact I make do with the large off and small at around 50%.

Hopefully at some point we will get a revamped timetable with more trains and perhaps using Joe’s skills to compile. In the meantime it’s not like the game really penalises you for running late.

 

Purely IMHO I would wish the opposite - train performance physics should be as accurate as possible, otherwise we might just as well all go off and play Trainz instead! The timetable sectional timings need to be as close to real life as possible, in that respect PFR is nowhere near as unachievable as SoS where some of the runs look like they used Class 86 or Pendolino timings!

 

That's what I meant. If the timetable is real-world accurate but unachievable then the physics are clearly not as per the real world, despite what SimuGraph says. I would rather the train physics are tuned so the real-world timetable is achievable (and therefore, by definition, the performance made real-world), rather than the timetable altered to reflect unrealistic trains.

Hopefully that clarifies.

 

That's not an answer. Driver Assist is tied to the "General ► Notification" setting. The problem is, so is the information about what the player does to affect the controls' state. You know, those thing that pop up on the right of the screen. I could drive without that information, sure, but it's a tradeoff I'd rather not make at all.

Yeah, I may have been a bit hasty with that one. But, as has been pointed out, something has to give. Either the physics aren't correct or the timetable isn't.
I wasn't able to find that specific service I was complaining about in the actual 1963 timetable, however, services similar to it do, admittedly, have timings that are even tighter at times. Maybe it's one of those "placeholder" ones that aren't actually supposed to be operated by Jubilees? That would explain how keeping time is impossible in a Jubilee, but pretty alright if you recreate the service in a Class 101.

What I was able to find is the very next service in the Journey (Manchester to London St. Pancras departing at 08:57). Despite this service also starting with a long uphill and the first timing being off by a minute not in the player's favour, I was easily able to keep time, arriving to the first stop 3 minutes early, instead of 2 minutes late. Again, supporting the theory that the first one just wasn't supposed to be done in a steam train.

Edit: I just got a "Set Cylinder Cocks to Open when stopped to prevent damage" Driver Assist message. The cocks were open at that moment and for at least a minute prior. It was bad enough when this spam kept happening for stupid, yet correctly detected reasons, but apparently, the reason doesn't even need to actually exist for the message to pop up. Amazing.

...and it's reproducible. Have a picture.

 

Good point…

 

I’m just having a quick go with the 4f. Is it a known bug that the auto fireman is shovelling coal into a closed firebox door?

 

Also when he's shovelling there's no coal on the shovel which needs sorting if they are able to

 

Trying to make scenarios with the 8F x2 + freight but in two of the three spawn places that can take this train is derails as soon as you start!

 

I did manage to make one scenario with the 8Fx2 it's now up on the Sharing Hub.



Note:- I aslo have two short 4F scenarios on there :-
4F Shuttle - Buxton (From Millers Dale)
4F Shuttle - Millers Dale (From Buxton)

 

Ohhh look... BUGS!

No offer of an improved timetable or DTG representative feedback (AGAIN)..

Getting tiresome now.

 

Just tried it and I find it better than SoS. But it won't become one of my favorite routes,

 

What can I say... I am liking the route and the attention to detail of the assets. The scenery is awesome and there's plenty of potential with scenarios there's a good mix of timetable activity. I did notice a few glitches in the tunnels starting at Chinley end of the route a piece of track in the tunnel was not dark like the rest of the tunnel and false positives (thinking the tunnel has came to the end, described as white flicking) when walking the tunnels.

 

"Why is there smoke coming out of your axle, Seymour?"
"Oh, that's not smoke, that's steam. Steam from the steam trains we're driving. Mmmm, steam trains."

On the 4F (first picture), the steam appears to come from nowhere, as whatever pipes are supposed to exhaust it, aren't modelled. On the Jubilee (second picture), steam from the third cylinder appears, again, out of nowhere. Now, I'm no steam specialist or anything, but that can't be right.

 

I agree with all these points. Some great discussions going on in the threat and Thank you Matt for the answers. I'm enjoying the route so far. I do hope we see more development on it to flesh it out and make it one of the top steam routes!

Here are some cool screenshots, the route does look good in the wet weather!



Also why is the headcam were it is as baseline, very limited view because of the glass. This pc mod has improved things greatly:https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/m...23-pfr-6p-8f-cab-cam-adjustments#comment-9635

 

Agreed, this route is very good and really captures that 60’s ‘Heartbeat’ (might need to look that one up) vibe.

What lets it down in the wet weather are the continuing poor rain / snow effects on the windscreens, and the reflectiveness of the terrain. As always the rain effect is just such low resolution and unnatural and once it starts you quickly lose the ability to see out of the window, a particular problem here as there’s no wipers of course.

Never a strong point in train sims (they’re really poor in TSC too), I’d love to see MSFS style rain / windscreen effects in this game. I can’t believe that what we have at the minute is the best that UE4 can do. We know it’s not of course, this being an example of UE4 and much better windscreen effects than we’re treated to in TSW (making no mention of the disparity in night lighting either);



ps Thanks for the link to the mod, hadn’t seen that!

 

Yea rain effects in UE are generally bad. I'm also using this rain mod which looks better than normal. https://www.trainsimcommunity.com/mods/c3-train-sim-world/c19-patches/i2856-tsw3-rain-update

 

That’s a good mod too. It’s what’s on the windscreen that’s the major problem but I believe it’s beyond the scope of being modded. Only DTG can change it.

 

As a practical in-game solution to the wet windows problem, you can open the cab window. You've got a roaring fire next to you, so it shouldn't actually be as chilly as it looks.

The real-life window wiper on these locos was the driver himself wielding a rag. It would be interesting to see some form of that modelled, so that we can temporarily see through the weather glass.

 

On the Bossman locos in TSC you can wind the cinder guard in so you don't get the glass scren obscuring the view in head out mode. Really can't understand why this feature wasn't carried over into TSW. As usual, silence from DTG on the matter.

 

One small thing I’ve noticed, on resuming a save game the car stoppers are not working at level crossings and vehicles are passing through the gates in front of the train. This maybe a core issue somewhere as we know the German routes continue to have issues with the car stoppers not working.

 

Hi There. i don't post often but do browse these forums from time to time.

so here's me 10 pence on this route.
In all i think this route is superb and the best yet . It really captures the feel of late BR steam. So well done Dovetail .
Although i think this route needs to be extended , to either Derby or Manchester or both, i would happily pay full price DLC for that.

So lets talk about the Loco Physics. To put things into context i spent a lot of time on the footplate on the GCR in my younger years as a fireman , So i know a thing or 2.
The New Physics update is very good i think. The loco's feel like they should now with the new cut off values and the power they have , they feel right. I even noticed the brakes have been improved and are much stronger now and you can bring a train to a halt with around 15inchs of vucuum which is exactly how it should be. They where much to weak before but now i think its spot on.

I did the Derby to Buxton service earlier and had no trouble keeping to the timetable . I was a minute late into Buxton.

My only bug bear is the steaming . Its better than before but until its properly implemented its kinda hard to tell .
You shouldn't loose so much boiler pressure when starting off. it does come back but i dunno if its to do with the way the auto fireman is set up or not . you would have your fire ready to go. its almost like this isn't taken into account and the fireman is responding too late and playing catch up. But until we get proper boiler physics cant really judge .
One thing i did notice is the pressure comes up when the firehole doors are open, and as soon as you close them it goes down. this is back to front and should be the other way round . so something is off there . You would normally have the doors closed or just cracked to control black smoke when not firing and under power.

Anyway that my 10 pence .Please keep it up Dovetail it slow but its gradually going in the right direction . We just need proper boiler and firing physics now. Oh and please give us colored smoke. You managed it in classic TS.

Cheers
Chris

 

I have the 1963 WTT and for passenger services have mapped them all to it. Not checked all intermediate timings but the start points seem about right and the calling patterns seem about right. This is far more accurate than Liverpool to Crewe.
The only obvious inaccuracy is on some of the Ambergate to Buxton trains so for instance the 1623 Ambergate to Buxton is actually the 2H53 1605 Derby Midland to Manchester Central stopper (Dep Ambergate 1624½). But guess you can treat it as such as far as Millers Dale then turn it into the 2H70 1726 Millers Dale to Buxton local?
The shame is that having come up with the right trains they often give them misleading Manchester to St Pancras names when they are not. That said there are a few genuine St Pancras trains in there.
So in my opinion the main reason it is hard to drive to the actual WTT is that by 1963 virtually all passenger trains on this line were diesel !
But it was a pleasant surprise to find virtually all trains were accurate - even if you had to use the Sunday times for a few of them.
I think the diesel v steam question on the mainline is partly addressed by shorter loads. So you can get close. The 0858 from Chinley to Matlock is in fact the 1C55 0825 Manchester Central to St Pancras due to depart 0857. With a one minute late start and hard driving I made Matlock by 0935 instead of the booked 0933½.

 

Just to add to this - I've seen the 1963 summer public passenger timetable (and tried to marry it up to the in-game timetable, with varying degrees of success) but I would be really interested in seeing both WTT if either of you are happy to share them here? Thanks

 

I transcribed the passenger WTT for each service in game (as opposed to each service there was) into excel but it wont let me upload that. So turned it into a PDF which is a bit more difficult to read but hope it makes sense to anyone interested. It was Summer 1963 so think that is what they used. All services were Diesel !

 

Further affirmation that this should have been a route offering both steam and diesel haulage, mainly the latter.

 

I must admit I wouldn't have thought it would be all diesel by 63 but not surprised. This route is really crying out for a 45/0, and a 104 ( a 25 would be a great bonus as well).

 

Though the route is modelled for the early 1960s, a 1950-ish steam-hauled timetable and an alternative 1960s primarily-diesel timetable could be a worthwhile solution. TSW does support a separate timetable per era, as is done on GWE for the "Diesel Legends" pack.

So does anyone have access to a steam-era timetable?

 

While I think of it, I don't actually think the MGR style of loading is appropriate for the limestone traffic. This is evidenced in part by the very large number of loading chutes built into the quarry loading dock, versus the four chutes (two on each road) provided at Redcar on Tees Valley. Much more likely would be for rakes of empty wagons to be parked under the loader, to be loaded at the quarry's leisure, and loaded rakes to be periodically shunted away to be marshalled into complete trains and then replaced with empty ones.

This implies that the loading chutes should operate only when the wagon under it is at a stand, and indeed when there is no locomotive attached to them. This would also be consistent with the loading process for other types of traffic, such as liquids and containers, in the modern era, and general wagonload traffic in the classic era (wagonload traffic being largely absent from the modern era), so it seems worthwhile to solve this problem more generally.

 

I noticed that some scenarios misstate their actual length:

• Chinley Gala says it's 1h 10m long. Took me 35m to complete.
• Deep Freeze says it's 1h 20m long. Took me 42m to complete.
• All Mixed Up says it's 2h 20m long. Took me 1h 53m to complete.

So half the scenarios inflate their length by about half an hour each. And I didn't pay attention to the other three, so who knows what's up with them. Seems like the route pretends like it's got more hours of scripted content that it actually has. And no, I didn't hurry or drive on the edge of the speed limit or anything like that, l just completed them normally. Perhaps, even a bit slowly. With All Mixed Up, for example, I could totally shave 10-15 minutes off my time just by driving at closer to 10mph in and out of sidings.

 

Chinley Gala also tries to activate again in the Journey sequence even though I already did it and has a green tick against it on the Journey list.

There's also an activity in Journey mode which is literally running a bank engine back through Peak Forest, takes about 2 minutes!

 

I think the Chinley gala one is because it is meant to be quite a laid back look around the stations and do the activities, which is what I did and I spent about and hour and a quater in that one. Deep freeze I haven't done but All Mixed Up definitely took me over two hours but not sure by how many minutes. I think it does very much depend on the way you drive though and so you being as close to the speed limit as possible when you can will obviously make the scenario quicker than what me and my rather laid back style. I do find it interesting how different people go about doing identical activities and end up doing it in completely different ways though but still get to the same end result.

 

Reading is hard.

Game: misstates the scenario's length. You: well I walked around doing nothing for 40 minutes so that must've been intended.
Come on now. There's no need to try to find far-fetched explanations, it's probably just a testing bot malfunction. I'm just pointing out the obvious mistake.

 

Just had to recreate a br green freight gala on wsr:

 

Woah could I have my head back! I was more referring to the bit below mate and you ought to be careful there because some people do genuinely struggle to read.

I wasn't doing nothing as I was having a look round a station which I haven't been to for years now, and then on the brake van tour I had a look around the sidings. I feel that this was kind of the point of this scenario.

I wasn't defending DTG at all but merely pointing out that I find it interesting that we have clearly done the same tasks but clearly in completely different ways. I wouldn't say it's a mistake though especially on the mixed up one as I wasn't walking around doing nothing at anypoint but just having a nice chilled drive.
Just because you've done something in x amount of time doesn't mean that's the pace everyone else will do it.

I will be sure to let you know how I get on with deep freeze mate so we can compare times there. Just to be clear I genuinely wasn't arguing what you said but did just find it interesting so there's no need to feel so defensive: I wasn't criticising you!

Have a lovely evening mate.

 

But of course that has led us to have an unrepresentative timetable.

 

I usually do the "walk around, see what's there" part while doing collactables, so just doing it mid-scenario isn't what I'd normally do. Besides, these non-timed scenarios are a very recent thing, so I guess I'm used to doing the scenarios as if they were timed.

Yeah, that's alright. Got a bit defensive there, didn't I? By the way, on Deep Freeze, be careful about that signal around Matlock, about 10 miles away from Buxton. The distant signal for it doesn't show up on the HUD. So if you only look at that, you'll pass a green, and then immediately see a red just 250yd away. Given how you're in a freight train doing 50mph at that point, that's not a good thing to see. You may remember the exact same issue from Royal Appointment.

 

Aren’t you hauling an unfitted train? I was under the impression that unfitted trains were usually kept at around 25mph. Is that not prototypical?

 

Fair dos, I have never done the collectables and this is the first route I've really walked around as Buxton is where I go on holiday every year so I know it quite well so it's interesting to see what it used to look like.

No hard feelings mate, it can be hard to tell whether someone is going for you or not through reading plain text mate.
Thanks for that heads up, I will probably do it after I get in from work tomorrow. I think I do remember this from the Royal scenario as, although I don't use the signalling HUD, I do remember thinking that it was lucky I saw the distant, which due to it being a royal train I wasn't expecting, or else I would have had an issue (though admittedly it would have been my fault).

 

I don't know whether the train in the scenario is fitted or not but if my memory serves me right you'd be correct that an unfitted train would be at 25 mph, though I could be wrong and be thinking of something else.

 

Look, I don't think we're trying to count rivets here - just avoiding gross errors that negatively affect gameplay.

It might not matter if we don't have the exact loco that actually hauled a particular train on a particular date. In fact, given the sheer variety of traction used at that time, and the relatively few types currently modelled, it will inevitably happen more often than not. But if it's booked for a Type 4 diesel or a 7P/8P steam loco, hauling that train with a Class 6 steam loco is likely to lose time, and that should prompt some introspection. Also, substituting a train actually formed by a 3-car DMU with a 5-coach steam-hauled one is a pretty significant change, not only in timing but in operational considerations.

Maybe you don't have all the exactly correct signalling for a circa-1950 timetable, but you could reasonably assume that what you do have is close enough to run the service, perhaps with a handful of problematic services removed or altered. Maybe there are some sidings that trains regularly shunted in 1950 but which were out of use by 1963. Certainly there are a few stations and halts that were closed in that timeframe. Those are things we can reasonably cope with.

 

We have verisimilitude in one area that has apparently come at the cost of verisimilitude in another area.

 

Were public ice-skating rinks next to railway lines a thing in the 1960's? I know we're a bit OTT with 'elf n safety these days but this just seems careless.

 

Man, I don't know. What am I, a 1960s steam engineer? I didn't even know what an "unfitted" train was until yesterday
The game tells you none of these kinda things. If only there was a way for it to explain historical practices and give additional information besides what's there in the tutorial services. Like a ma... a mau... manu... nope, doesn't come to mind.

Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem doing external research. But if the train will happily accelerate to 50mph up a 1% gradient, while the stopping distance remains pretty reasonable, I'm not going to assume that I should've actually been doing 25. I mean, when you drive freight on KWG, you just get restricted to 120km/h no matter the line speed. And you can't go faster than 250 in an ICE despite some segments of track allowing 300. So there is a way for the game to restrict speed beyond what the speed limit happens to be. As it wasn't used here, I assumed doing 50 is fine.

What are you talking about? We've not been "given" anything, you just have some books with timetables printed in them. There's a lot of steps between that and the customers receiving a product. And even then, we're not being "given" things, we're paying for them.

Edit, so as not to doublepost: just got a new kind of Driver Assist spam. It said "Steam pressure is too low, close the regulator." What was the steam pressure? About 180PSI. Very low, I know. Soon after, I had that same message again and was quick enough to made a screenshot.

As you can see, the needle is perilously close to zero and the game over is imminent.

Edit the second: the last service in the "Freighter" chapter of the Journey is called "Rowsley Sidings - Gowhole Sidings (Mixed)," and the descriptions says "Drive this mixed freight service from Rowsley Sidings to Gowhole Sidings."
The train actually spawns at Ambergate and the finishing point is at Rowsley. So nevermind being consistent with reality, the timetable isn't even consistent with itself.