Don't see a Freight Hauler discussion thread, so I made one. Mods, please merge if there's a duplicate. Now that we've seen some footage of Freight Hauler mode, what are your thoughts? What do you like or not like? What would you want to see in the future? If you just plain hate it, that's cool, but maybe keep it to the myriad complaint threads. I'm not a mod though so you do you. For me, it's something I've been hoping for in TSW for a long time. LIKES That it exists at all. DTG are taking a chance on revamping freight and I'm here for it. It seemed to mostly work as intended from what they showed. No more buggy than the rest of TSW at least with the backwards check mark lol. It incorporates the existing timetable, which honestly would be a deal-breaker for me if it didn't have AI traffic. There are both in-yard moves, and lineside drop off and pickup locations. From what I can tell you should be able to build local freights and run them across the map to their destinations. Random generation of switching moves. If i'm understanding Matt correctly, it will spawn not only different cars each time, but in different locations as well, and the total number of cars is randomized. This massively increases replay value if implemented well*** Freedom to do the jobs in any order you want CONCERNS That DTG won't develop it any further. By far my biggest worry. There's s history of this happening in TSW and Matt's comments on the preview were not exactly reassuring wrt to bringing it to older routes and future development. I really, really hope they keep going on it. The total number of cars to switch seems way too high for most people, especially in one session. With the flaky savegame, I think an option to set the total to 25 (or something like that) should be a top priority. Matt said giving an option to do 100 cars is fairly simple, so the opposite should be just as easy, right? Bugs aside, the UI overlay is functional but not very elegant. Reminds me a lot of Railroader, which is a great game but still in early access. I'd like to see the reporting marks listed as well as the road number (e.g. not just 26742, but GATX26742). Glad it can be toggled on and off, but maybe a transparency slider and some sizing options? The live map icons are just plain ugly imo, especially the big red X when you zoom out. Could the car icons themselves change color instead? Like instead of blue the undelivered cars could be red? Idk but it needs improvement. ***Random generation of switching moves. The downside is you could end up with a ton of nonsensical moves like delivering autos to a chemical plant, etc. Hopefully there's a weighting system to the random generation that minimizes this. That not all sidings/industries may be available at launch. Not great, so hopefully it won't be very many. HOPES FOR THE FUTURE That they can bring it to older routes and make it a standard feature on new routes (where appropriate). It would breathe so much life into older routes imo. There are many, many routes with extensive freight yards and industries that are never or barely touched in the existing timetables. Blocking options. What was shown in the preview had cars to one destination scattered all over the yard. While that can absolutely happen IRL, it would be great to have the option to toggle how strictly they're blocked (Railroader says hi). Matt mentioned that it will spawn formations of cars for one destination as well, so maybe that's already sort of implemented in the background. A way to easily create a switching list in-game (again, copying Railroader isn't the worst idea). Would be extra cool to have it as a "paper" document that lives on the control desk, or mounts to the wall. Some kind of persistent progression. For sure that's feature creep into a career mode, but, why not dream a little lol? Ok enough of my rambling. What do you all think?
As a person who is specifically a big fan of freeroaming freight (and developer of the freeroam generator), I love that it actively shows to players that this part of the game exists (it exists for years already) and what it can do. In all other ways I find it extremely limiting. You can do the same thing already and have much better control over it. If this is meant to target casual players who don't want to spend time on thinking about reasonable wagon moves (which is fine), then having the average number of wagons to sort in 35-45 range without means to affect it is insane. Unless they are all reasonably grouped already and their destination is all in the same yard, that would take like 4-6 hours to complete. That's useless for the target audience that just wants to fill a progress bar. Even if you want to just build one nice combined consist in freeroam now, you have to spend like 30 minutes building it. But that's how it is, shunting is not very fast type of operation. For this to be enjoyable for casuals, the task asked would have to be like three wagon groups to be moved overall during one session.
I would agree with what has been said already above. After looking at it for the first time (and not yet very thoroughly, I may add) I would not consider myself to be the main target audience. Even though I am a big fan of freight in TSW, I am also a big fan of the sim being as close to reality as possible, when it comes to procedures and irl flows. And this mode will also suffer all the shortcomings of free roam, that it will not make a difference between a shunting move and a train move, for example. Further more it makes the impression that the waggons are not only scattered in a pretty random pattern but also that you are not actually building a new consist but simply need to drop them off in a pretty random pattern as well (albeit pre defined). Also, the fact that I have virtually no control over amount of waggons, what type of waggons (ie, I would like to be able to define either what type of cargo, or what waggons exactly, I would really favour expert waggons only) or in what area of the map will probably prevent me from using it on a regular basis. It certainly has alot of potential, however, judging on how the new features of TSW6 were developed throughout its life cycle makes me doubt that this will see much more improvents. Happy to be proven wrong, though. Especially need to see what its like on different routes, maybe some of my delusional comments are simply wrong
Seems like an attempt to get one over on Run 8, who basically pioneered this type of gameplay. However it is far more suited to the open world nature of Run 8 where the railway is essentially yours to play how you want. Run 8 also has a very dynamic dispatcher system which facilitates the Industry side of things, with the option to take "Otto" off line and call up the DS board to do it yourself. The Industry game in Run 8 is also emergent as you can keep bringing in manifests to form up into Locals which you then take out to service the various spurs. Completed cars need to be taken back to the yard or hump and sorted into outgoing services, which can either be sent if via AI or driven by the player if you fancy a change from switching. Most important, Run 8 is not bound by a single save slot, so if you want to take a break from doing Socal Industry and run a Tropicana hotshot on the Florida route you can, without worrying about overwriting. Definitely a case of DTG putting the cart before the horse, if it's really going to take several hours to process all the traffic, that one save slot means you can't do anything else that might also need saving in the meantime.
I quite like the look of this - I tend to spend a lot of time dotting stuff around Carlisle and Crewe and rounding it up with an 08 - would be fun to have this included by default from now on. Perhaps with a slider that allows you to change the number of wagons to sort - 50 seems a lot, and “save” rarely allows me to reload and continue a previous session without some random weirdness breaking everything (non-reversing 47, looking at you )…
Looking at the preview for Miami it would take hours to complete it. If there was an option to adjust how many wagons spawned to make it shorter that would be good, otherwise I'll probably play this once or twice then never again. Also there's a very big miscommunication going on, at first they said that freight hauler was still possible on legacy routes if you disabled freight layers but now all of a sudden it's only for TSW 7 routes?
I personally like this idea, hours of gameplay sorting stuff out, random populated sidings in timetable mode sounds great to me, and slotting in between timetabled trains to get to another part of the route adds random signal checks and variation. Looking forward to this and it's evolution. Hopefully they will introduce it to other routes.
A concern is that us console players may not have the availability to spawn a loco in as most routes say not enough space in tsw in timetable mode
Good points all around. Does seem like some interest at least. Lets hope DTG can take the constructive feedback onboard and make some meaningful improvements over the course of TSW7.
This is what the FAQ said on 26 august: What is Freight Hauler? Freight Hauler is a brand-new game mode that allows players to freely move freight around their favourite routes. Freight cars will be randomly distributed across the route awaiting delivery to their destination. You can freely spawn locos and move around the route by setting a path to get the job done any way you see fit. The in-game map will provide you with detailed information about each freight car, which can also be viewed as a floating tooltip in-game. New routes have been optimised to work with Freight Hauler mode by disabling freight layers and will be marked as compatible. Older timetables will still work, but we recommend that you manually disable freight layers for a smoother experience. If a train does end up in your way, you can simply remove it using the provided free roam tools. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/2026082...articles/35735377213458-Train-Sim-World-7-FAQ
Thanks for making this thread, I was thinking about doing so myself. I was under the impression that the number of wagons to sort could be manually set. I really thought I had read that in one of the articles or something. This needs to be an option. A 38 wagon session is much too long. I don't want to keep resetting until I generate a low enough number. Something else that would be nice is to set a list of pickups and dropoffs from the total list of possible destinations. For instance, you could set 10 wagons to originate in a main yard, then select one or more yards or industries for drop off. Or vice versa. So there could be a little more control over the number of destinations. This need not include individual tracks, just generalized areas. So you could put a train together to deliver to just one industry and then take some wagons back to the yard, put a train together in one yard and then sort it in another yard, etc. As others have said, when we first heard about this it was implied that it would be back-compatible. I was looking forward to trying it out on some older routes. Now DTG are saying that it is not back-compatible. So obviously I feel like this is something that DTG should make a serious effort on. 1. Select number of wagons 2. Select pickup zones and/or dropoff zones (some zones could be both) 3. Back-compatible Beyond this I would like to see the ability to choose the wagons as well, so you could simulate collecting some specific wagons for certain industries you want to service. I can appreciate that this could be done in freeroam, but the randomness of perhaps just a few wagons that still need to be sorted and delivered to me adds replay value. As far as the interface and on-screen display, without playing it's hard to judge so that review will have to come later.
I like doing this stuff, but not for hours. As already said, a slider from 0 to whatever wagons, plus additional save slots will be necessary for an enjoyable game.
Short term I think they need to reduce the number of movements or operations required (not necessarily the number of wagons). For example, taking 40 wagons to 1 place is OK. Shunting 40 wagons 1 by 1 then moving them to 40 places is not. Long term they need to allow the player to choose the number of movements and the minimum and maximum distance a wagon can be from the destination. Also I want to ask if anyone at DTG thought what would happen with the current system as it is, if someone shunts and delivers 45 of 50 total wagons, and after several hours of work the game crashes for whatever reason. I bet many people, specially casuals, wouldn't play the game ever again.
All those wagons being spawned on a longer, busier route such as Milton Keynes to Crewe which doesn't run great on console as is from what I hear, and then trying to layer in the regular timetable as well could lead to all kinds of trouble. Mind you I remember when my XBox would crash from me merely wanting to do the Brighton Mainline tutorial.
You are correct and I think this is one of the reasons why DTG has not followed through with back-compatibility at this point. When you run freight hauler in TSW7 all the "normal" freight layers are automatically disabled. At first DTG recommended for the player to do this manually on older routes. The concern probably developed that players who did not manually disable freight layers were going to get a lot of crashes. As others have said, a crash at the end of a 6 hour playthrough would be... detrimental. Or it might appear not to work at all. Some players surely wouldn't even know to disable layers in the first place because they didn't necessarily read the FAQ or watch a stream. So my hope would be that at some point DTG brings freight hauler back to at least a selection of older routes. I wouldn't mind if they took a poll or something to let us have a say on what those routes were. But in any case I do feel that eventual back-compatibility is a key to this feature.
Gives me some distant Derail Valley vibes, which I like. Could increase my interest in doing freight here some more, if done well. Feels a bit more purposeful than most TT freight jobs, that often just start or end in the middle of nowhere
Just give me a yard and a Gronk to do some shunting in. Or more of the little station pilot jobs where you go and pick up the loco from Paddington and take it back up to the siding. They're fun.
Exactly why I'm looking forward to this being implemented on future JT routes. Implementing this on Crewe - Preston in particular would be amazing.
Just looked at the preview stream, and I didn’t like what I saw. Seemed like a nice idea, but the execution is rather abysmal. The main problem is that the amount of wagons is just way too high. As others mentioned above, it will take many hours to get all of it done. There should be a simple setting that scales the amount of wagons: ~5 on easy mode, ~15 on medium and ~30 on hard. Having 5 to 15 wagons scattered around the map fulfills what was — as far as I can see — the original thought behind the new mode: Take 1-2 trips along the route and briefly stop in yards to load/unload a handful of wagons. With the HUD currently listing the name of the yard and track each wagon needs to be brought to, I could also imagine it being quite difficult to find it on the map since there are so many. Maybe a visual indication could help here.
It's a new feature...I'll be amazed if it's available on all three new routes lol. But yeah we were told it would be on legacy routes as well
