Any Demand For Road Knowledge Cheat Sheets?

Something that I feel kills immersion for me is having the little marker map in the top-right corner showing me where signals and speed boards are. Whilst it certainly allows the user to jump into any route and comfortably drive to the speed limits and pull up gracefully at stations, it detracts from the experience of driving a train - namely knowing the route like the back of your hand - and turns it more into a game. Turning it off though is especially troubling when you want to bounce around between different routes but can't remember all the speed board and station locations and have a big overshoot or get caught speeding; even more immersion killing!

I've seen some people link to the official Network Rail maps which are needlessly complicated for the average TSW player, so I've set about creating my own road knowledge cheat sheets based on my own experiences when I became a train driver nearly 20 years ago.

These road knowledge sheets aren't meant to give the user a history lesson on cultural or historical landmarks, list every single signal number location or safety system in use, but merely to get you from point A to point B without speeding or overshooting stations. It omits turn out speeds for non-pathed moves, as well as points of no return, shunt limits etc. as those aren't relevant to the game 99% of the time. I laminated my cheat sheets back in the day and kept them in my work bag for the first year or so as a quick reference if I was unfamiliar with the route, now I just print these out and leave them next to my desk.

So far I've done Suffragette and WCMLS Watford Junction to Euston, and I still have Mildmay, BCC, East Coastway and Brighton Main Line to do, so that I can easily hop between routes as often as I like, and wanted to see if there was any demand for them?

I've tried to make the location comments as user-friendly as possible so anyone can use the document and in all weathers and time of day, however, there may be a couple of locations here or there that perhaps only make sense to me, so if anyone uses them and has some confusion, feel free to point them out. My braking markers can be a little all-over the place, with some being a bit closer to the platforms than others, so you may need to wiggle between braking strength to get a desired speed that you're comfortable with on approach to stations.

To read them, you simply choose the direction you're going, and then follow it down the page. Red rings with a number are speed boards, purple triangles are braking markers, and grey rows are stations (the arrow on the left denotes what side the platform is on). Some stations have a blue square, which tells you if the stop marker is in an unusual place, such as halfway down the platform. I tend to read the rows only up to the next station whilst stopped at the current station. Saves me getting overly confused and reading too far in advance.

I've attached the Suffragette Line as an example, but I'm happy to share others if there's demand.

 

Great work
I like driving HUDless and this is quite useful for the routes where speed limits change quite frequently.

 

These look great for UK routes where speed changes are rarely signed or signalled in advance, the only reason I even use the HUD. I've been using Noir's EBuLa renditions for years driving hudless on DE routes, would love to see these populate the ingame now blank screens someday. For those interested they are in this thread linked below and on train sim community.
https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/book-timetable-ebula-for-german-routes.62326/

 

I've stuck my name on the bottom of them in the footer.

If you wish to share them in some sort of official capacity, that's fine by me. I don't have any desire to do every single route (especially outside of the UK), but as I slowly buy up routes, I'll try to create more and more. If you want to move this thread to the FAQs & Guides section, I'm happy to continue to populate it there (I'm a new member so I'm guessing I don't have permission to post there, yet).

Here's my WCMLS Lioness Route cheat sheets:

 

the document is missing a legend for all the symbols, otherwise it is well done

 

I think this is brilliant. I would personally prefer signals on it though as well - not so important for Suffragette line, but other lines where the spacings very wildly. Also unclear how it would deal with different routings e.g. Manchester Airport. That said the previous are just suggestions and I must reiterate my first comment - this is absolutely fantastic!

I'd even be prepared to pay for this as a service (although suspect a charity donation / pay what you like system is probably more appropriate, so that you don't have any "obligation" to do specific things).