Hi all, Whenever I jump on a train it is in Quick Drive. Is it possible in quick drive to see which of the offered locomotives & consists are reasonably "correct" (not taking the era in to account) for a specific route?
All it does is exclude electric locomotives from non-electrified routes. The rest is up to you, first resource is to google for the route you're playing on. Many routes have Wikipedia pages.
Thanks, that js too inconvenient. When I want to drive a train I do not want to find an interweb connection and read wikipedia first. Often the road image displays a locomotive ( but often very blurry), so often I try to pick an engine that looks similar.
There is a potential feature - filter to the consists offered by the route, or for the route (the latter exists for QD AI consists, maybe those are also driveable except fragments of course). Other than that the best thing could be something like RWE2 where you have an external database with potential connections and roll randomly, with restrictions (none, route, loco, train, etc.). Issue is with player consists, so this can get deep. Thus far I didn't notice players willing to add so much metadata to everything. (Deep example: The SP SD45 pack comes with a box car painted in Golden West Service livery, which was an outsourcing attempt by the SP. A few still exists, so it makes sense for scenarios from about 1985, mostly in the southwest US as unit train but in tiny numbers could show up anywhere.) In the US you cannot really go wrong, if you follow photographers you'll see that host railroads are better represented but there is virtually everything everywhere, including leaders. There are a few restrictions such as in PTC areas, busy electric main lines, but even that can be surprising. Aging trains have a tendency to show up anywhere, be it museums or relegated to casual duty - several German premium trains have finished their lives on branches, and I'm seeing lots of SD70s landing with branch lines, which is the UK equivalent of running a Class 66 on Falmouth Branch. So. I don't know how you pick your quick drives, and how much general knowledge do you have, but I usually have a loco in mind and consider the routes I own / know, what would make sense.
I don't think as a player anyone can do anything with it, except learning it. I had a lot of text but removed a while later. Basically in agreement with Spikee. A developer can try and build a consist generator or picker. Each DLC comes with assets, consists and scenarios, the latter using assets, so connections can be made. When in the editor you choose an asset pack, it shows its consists. These could be used to build trains, or use as-is. One more thing is power-to-weight, consists for Sherman Hill are underpowered for mountains, even if otherwise correct. Examples of trains with foreign / random power. For example, this is a CSX train. And this is BNSF. And a last CSX example:
I just look the route up in either career or standard scenarios and see what locomotives and consists are being used there. Then go back to quickdrive and load one of those particular locomotives which you would imagine are correct. Although I don't actually bother whether the locomotive is correct or not and just drive a locomotive I like driving. I'm all for an easy life.
For the US, it's really a case of just look around the internet and various videos posted in different eras for a specific route, and you can pretty much figure out what, where and when to run something. Not to mention you get the wierd oddball now and again.
I have a complete database of all US (UK and Europe) routes and scenarios. From this I can derive which trains/rolling stock are pertinent. Is this something you would be interested in?
Sounds great Kilt, . . . although I am after a swift & quick & easy in-game solution I would love to see that database.
Since trains in the US can technically go anywhere I suspect having a programmed solution via Dovetail will not happen. I will publish my database later today. Alternatively use this map: https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=96ec03e4fc8546bd8a864e39a2c3fc41 Respectfully
For North American railroads watch a few of these videos: https://www.youtube.com/@VirtualRailfan or live Railcams: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDlykLh1oq0EknlIbiNWbhxya4F0Ruw2n
For Europe (mainland) you can lookup compositions of services on Vagon. It shows them in time so you can lookup what the composition was in a particular year. (Even scheduled vs real) https://www.vagonweb.cz/ If you use ThirdRails for a real drive QD it will give you direct link if available.
