An Alternative To "route Merging"

One of the things that has come up recently, especially with the reveal of Fife Circle, is the idea of merging routes which share a terminus station. With the obvious appeal being the immersion of seamlessly completing your journey, switching trains, and travelling along a completely different line. In reality this is obviously easier said than done for various technical reasons.

So I had a think and I wonder what people's thoughts are on some sort of "Suggested Next Journeys" as a compromise solution.

For example, you finish a service in Edinburgh, the game recognises where and when you are, and when the usual menu options appear, you also have a new quick select menu of realistic next services. If you're in Edinburgh you'd have options for the next trains back to Fife, or along to Glasgow. If you select one, the game will load it just as it would if you'd picked it from the main menu. So the routes are still entirely disconnected, but the downtime between them is reduced.

Alternatively, if you want to take the limitations out of it completely, you could simply allow users to favourite whatever route services they like and have those appear in a "Favourites" panel after a service instead.

I personally don't think the current system of booting back to the main menu to change routes is particularly tedious at all, but for those wanting a more seamless experience maybe something like this would be a nice middle ground.

 

This is not a bad idea!
(This should be in suggestions btw)

 

Ahh damn I thought it was! That's my own fault for coming straight from the Fife Circle thread and not double checking!

A lesson for next time

 

Have suggested this before, but not had much feedback. Merged routes would be great but a middle ground could be as follows. Edinburgh for example has a red door that you can enter into the room beyond. Perhaps when you leave the room, a choice could flash up. Glasgow or Fife Circle, this of course would depend on whether or not you had both DLCs. If so, you could re-enter the station on the Glasgow or Fife Circle DLC at the same time as you entered.
This may not be easy to implement, but would save going back through all the menus. Brighton and Hagen etc would have to be upgraded to add a "red door" in place of an existing static door in the station. Paddington could be done with different doors in Underground and Main line stations.

 

I do think something like this should be considered. The option to go back to the route's services after finishing your service is a step in the right direction though.

 

Whilst a good idea, the only limitation would be the time period each route is set in.

 

A clever system for interconnecting experiences within the game sounds like a great idea.

 

And also the timetables would have to match up so AI trains were the same, making the illusion of a combined route seem real. Not impossible just needs time to do it. Alternatively, you could have markers that would allow you to walk over to them and change to a different route eliminating the need for any sort of menu. Ideally, you could also toggle these so they didn't spoil the realism. Perhaps they could be in the form of a poster or another item in a staff room.

 

I actually do this already, so for example driving RSN from finnentrop to Hagen, I will continue on from Hagen to Wuppertal and then Köln to Aachen... sometimes even Avignon to Marseille.
It's a little immersion breaking to select it in the menu so this would be an awesome idea!

 

I remember suggesting something similar a while ago, where they would place them markers like they do for scernarios in timetable mode at the points where routes connect in order to switch route but keep time and weather the same, that way could also be used to connect up routes like GWE to BKL by the connection being at Paddington on both to go up to GWE and down to BKL type thing, as they don’t necessarily need to be the same track aswell for this way to work, (this way could connect any route to any route, example Bakerloo to Trenton but it shouldn’t be used in that way I don’t think, only if it makes sense like the 2 Brighton’s at Brighton or as I’ve mentioned Bakerloo and GWE with Paddington station)

 

Things like that are definitely what got me thinking about the Favourited Journeys idea as an alternative. Likely less difficult to implement and much more flexible. Players could use it to try and smooth the jump between sections of their journey like I suggested above, or they can go wild and instantly (relatively speaking) jump across countries as they please.

 

I'd really like to do Euston to Glasgow on the WCML, and then do Glasgow to Edinburgh, followed by the entire ECML back down to London.... because i'm crazy like a bag of spanners.

Only problem is that DTG like to set their routes in different time periods, so if Fife Circle is current day, Cathcart Circle is 2014, and then DTG decide to keep WCML over Shap set in the 1980s.... How are these route merges supposed to work exactly?

It's going to look a bit silly if you have BR Blue Class 86s and Intercity Class 87s mixing with Scotrail Class 314s and Class 380s at Glasgow.

 

likely a problem to deal with in the future, it’s a issue with many routes, to get BR etc and modern they have to be done twice and selling for money wise that’s an issue.

 

Much appreciated Alex, thanks for shifting the thread over!

 

This idea is really only a half-measure compared to full route merging as I say. The routes would still be entirely disconnected and seperated via a loading screen so you wouldn't have issues of mismatched rolling stock etc but you would have to accept the suspension of disbelief of the time period shifting a bit between loading screens.

It's issues like this that definitely have me leaning more towards a universal favourites list instead of the game making its own curated suggestions. Even stuff created in scenario planner could be available so folk could create slightly more tailored scenarios specifically for linking to other routes.

This is now actually making me wonder if some sort of custom playlist mode would work so you could pre-select any combination of seperate routes, timetables, scenarios etc and play through them back to back. That way, once you get going, you won't even need to fiddle in menus at all. Finish a service, click "next in playlist" on the pop-up menu, and load into the next thing.

 

Excellent idea and in the survey this was probably brought up. If you want an American example it's the Northeast Corridor Trenton to Boston route with the Long Island Railroad