I have just tired to do the powering America part 1 four times and I think it's broken on Xbox unless I'm doing something wrong witch I don't think I am it lets me load the coal then back up to the carts connect to them then as soon as it says the brakes will take five min to release that's it can't go any further it's done my head right in
...just curious- have you tried uncoupling from the cars then recoupling back up to them after running into this issue? I ran into this same issue in a scenario in Oakville Sub in TSW 2020, and uncoupling/recoupling fixed my issue. Simple enough thing to try, hopefully it works.
I tried having a go at this and the game didn’t acknowledge me releasing the loco brake when the instructions told me to. So, I loaded the coal carts anyway, coupled them back into the consist, switched cabs, drove all the back to the red signal and the instruction for releasing the loco brake was still being displayed.