Being into trains all my life. Train Sim World is a new take on modern railroading at its finest. It's nice having railroads around the world be introduced into TSW, but I would like to see a big take in North American railroading. Sandpatch Grade with CSX was a great start. It would be nice to include larger routes. Like be able to take a freight train in Indiana, run through the states Illinois and Ohio to get to Pennsylvania. The Norfolk Southern Railroad should be introduced next to offer more immerse freight train scenarios. Creating more generic locomotives and rolling stock. There should be a throw back to the predecessor railroads that came before, like having the B&O/Chessie System operating sand patch grade with cabooses. With a mixture of Western Maryland RR and Seaboard System RR locomotives and freight cars. Same goes for Conrail before being split by NS and CSX. Conrail had acquired alot of railroads in 1976 with various power from bankrupt railroads of the Northeast, USA. Hopefully someday this will come to TSW. With the power of current gen consoles. This can and could become reality. Current Modern railroading is nice, but with hints of steam trains arriving. It's fair to say railroading of the 1970's to 1990's should get a shot too.
Just gonna stop you right there. There is no way in hell that DTG will ever make a route that long.....
You never know. There's always that possibility. Specially since it would be a big step closer to the real deal. The NS Fort Wayne Line i live next to is over 200+ miles from Pittsburgh, PA to Fort Wayne, Indiana. It would be so awesome for DTG to include the entire route. It would be endless scenarios. A lot of us railfans would enjoy something like that. Specially the diehard enthusiasts. It would also play a big part if multiplayer was included. It would be a full on virtual simulated railroad experience. Be the best closest thing to real railroading.
Gonna have to back up with Blacknred on this one. Not just saying making a realistic route into a train sim is possible. But what you want (as a full route), is entirely impossible. As the Devs have said before, making long accurate routes (40-60 miles as of right now), depends on how much time it'll take to make one. And pretty sure no one wants to drive on a 200+ mile route (especially from freight services) without being bored all the way and quits halfway too.
The scenarios can be cut up into parts over a vast route. 40-60 miles seems reasonable, but depends on speeds and restrictions of the route. The Peninsula Corridor route at 47 miles is a good size at passenger running, but small on freight running. Being able to highball at track speed, covering the entire route doesn't take much to get through on freight. I just think running alittle bigger on routes would make things interesting. At some point DTG would have to go 60+ miles if people want horseshoe curve and the cajon pass routes for as vast as those routes are.
Apart from the difficulty of making such long routes within the development budget allocated to a DLC, based on maximum possible sales at a reasonable price point, DTG like to cater for the larger part of their player base as a priority. As the attention span of train simulator fans gets shorter, with the average play session in a service being 27 minutes, route length will only grow to meet the maximum play times of a certain percentile of the player base. SPG is probably already close to that length already. A service on that route can take 2.5 hours to complete. Fast passenger routes like the recent LGV are more likely to be made longer than freight routes just for that reason, with dev time on the freight routes dedicated more towards playability options such as yard work over route length. It’s not completely impossible to have freight routes longer than SPG but they are unlikely to get much longer than that, especially if large yards are included, as the track work in yards takes a long time to create. Very long routes with only A-B action and no yards would be of limited appeal to most, I guess, but not completely off the table. I just don’t see DTG prioritising that any time soon. It’s quite possible that a 3rd party developer might want to take a chance on creating long routes but that is probably way off in the future as 3rd party developers are only just coming on board with TSW now and may not want to take a risk on such large projects so early on.
Agreed, but the idea of a Norfolk Southern line in Indiana is valid, perhaps an east-west route starting in Fort Wayne. It's a very busy area for all kinds of freight, including coal and DTG has a long-standing license from NS. Plus, NS has always had a somewhat unique roster of locomotives, so opportunities for something different there.
It would seem to be a big massive undertaking on a future build, but the question would be is it something we would like? I'm just an average train fan joe that likes long hauls. When it comes to the Ft Wayne Line I live next to. I assume they're are 4 yards along its route. The yard in FT Wayne Indiana, Mansfield yard in Mansfield, Ohio, thats part of the former Erie Lackawanna Railroad off the main line, the Canton Yard in Canton, Ohio, and the Pittsburgh yard in PA, which i take is the biggest yard on the line before heading to Harrisburg, PA.
NS does have a unique roster, but I just hate the fact of what they done to former Conrail locomotives. I would have to say CSX has more class that NS because of what locomotives you see on trains. When CR operated the FT Wayne Line is was straight GE Dash 8W power leading most trains with mixes of EMD and so on. Under NS, the Main source of power you'll see is Dash 9Ws with very little EMD. I've seen CSX running with GP30's, a loco you don't often see, but has class to it. It's just something NS doesn't do.
