The First Person (FP) walk around nature of TSW is fantastic. I've always felt simulators should have a walk around capability to really make the realism. The next step for TSW would be to add extra controllable crew members to a train such as a conductor, brakeman and/or switchman. The brakeman and conductor might be connected to the train (they go with you on long trips), but there might be generic switchmen in the yard to help but would remain behind. Or some combo of that. Why? When the train is in the yard or a side spur but doing stuff (like switching cars), the engineer (player) should stay in the engineer's seat to drive the train while the other crew members would be outside the train changing switches, coupling cars, setting/unsetting brakes, etc. Right now, I use the 2D map, or use external views to "fly" around the yard to do this work, but it isn't very realistic. Extra crew members would be characters in the sim that the player can switch to with a key press and manipulate that person to perform these functions in FP mode. I imagine most the code is already in TSW to make this happen. The effort would be adding animations for walking crew members as we would see them go about their business. Otherwise, crew members would simply work like additional views - like pressing the 2 or 3 keys for external views, but maybe instead the 4, 5, and 6 key would switch to other crew members. Or use a pop up context menu to select available people. Movement would be constrained by the same aspects of FP mode for the normal player (i.e. walking on the ground, not flying through the air, using E and the mouse to manipulate their world). Crew members would remain where you last left them, and that is one of the important parts. When switching a train around the yard, you need to have crew members positioned to direct the engineer and do their job. That means sometimes they ride on the train (hanging off the side of a car or engine) and sometimes they are walking around while the train is moving some distance away. And in the end, you need to think about how you are going to transport the crew efficiently to where they need to be to do their jobs and not leave them behind when it's time to leave the yard. When it's a mile long train how you get a crewman where he needs to be is just as important as how you drive the train. A side feature would be to add drivers to the yard that can pick up a crewman (or the player) and drive them to another location in the yard. In some of the scenarios, we have to walk (run) from the back of the train to the front. I'm sure real train workers avoid doing this as much as possible.
Multiplayer - the above suggestion would tie in well with Multiplayer. I assume when you implement multiplayer one day, you will have to deal with the part about people walking/running around the yard and being seen by the other players. So adding the ability for a crewman to be a multiplayer person, or a player controlled person should be trivial at that point.
