The Long And Short Of It?

There's been this long debate and constant level of complaining from some about there dislike for shorter routes,But know one really ever defined what is considered a short route.So just what length does any route need to be to escape being labeled to short a route?

 

In excess of 40miles

 

Over 40 miles i say.

 

Sam that response reads like you have a leg either side of the fence. I think I know what you mean though (scratching head and rereading)

 

The basic point Sam's making is that "miles" is the wrong unit of measure, it's "minutes."

 

Agreed, look how long it takes to run a full service on Bakerloo despite only being ~14mi long.

I would agree too that a full length full service run of 45 minutes, or an express/high-speed run of ~30 minutes, would be an adequate changeover point between "short" and "long" (this is for mainline commuter services primarily, freight is a slightly different story especially on multi-service routes like MSB)

 

Define normal

 

A route under 40 miles is short in my opinion and and services that are under an hour are short as well. 30 minutes is extremely short

 

Median? Or Mean? The former is vulnerable to changing based on a single outlier at the extreme top or bottom end, even if the majority of routes take much longer or shorter times to run. The latter reflects a broader sampling of routes, but is in turn influenced by every new route added.

 

Actually the mean is more susceptible to outliers, until there are enough of them to not actually be outliers.

 

As usual this comes down to who you ask, how you ask the question and what he respondent's preference is

If you say to someone "is a 40 mile route a short route" the first response SHOULD be another question... mainly "for what transit type"
If it's a HST drive then yes, 40 miles is short and likely to be over in a few minutes, but what about a full Bakerloo drive? That route is probably more like 30, but with all stops would last about an hour.

Yes there are those who want to be able to drive two hour or 100+ mile drives, but as has been said before if the average driven time is about the 30-40 minute range then aiming it so that a regional train drive is in this range seems reasonable. Of course high speed trains will shoot through in half the time (that's what they're designed to do) and stoppers may be slower (or only use parts of the route) but this IS what trains do in real life.

For me I'm happy that a route has a certain length, certain complexity etc but I know others want everything they can get.

 

I was just typing out a very long winded post that basically said the same thing in about a thousand words too many but have decided to delete it and say “What Matt said” instead to save everyone the burden of reading my waffle

 

The perfect service route in terms of length is the one where I see lots of life going on around me (moving diggers etc please)

 

Oakville's a noteworthy example, in how your average freight run down the length of the line is over in little more than 15 minutes, (which can be perfect for a quick session when you have a little free time in your day and don't want to contend with saving messing up signals), but there's some longer jobs when it comes to stuff like Ethanol loading, and because of how TSW2 tends to split loading and assembly of consists from straight freight runs with them in the timetable, it's essentially two routes each with their own gameplay type, and so it depends what you enjoy the most whether the stuff you are engaging with there more is going to be longer or not.

 

I just find it more useful to track as it makes discrepancies like the range skewing a certain way under the influence of a handful of values stand out more. It's one of those things that jumps off a graph at a glance.

But mostly that's from things like the amount of times I've had to point out that when you look at mean income it highlights how much more skewed towards the top bracket it is than median does. In which case comparing the two is always valuable too.

 

I find that in most cases median is a better expression of the overall reality, except with near-liner distributions. With anything like an asymmetric bell curve (which are far more common in most applications), mean is a very misleading number.

 

When in a 43 the Pad to Reading is far to short, yet doing it in a 101 takes ages.
60 minutes doing the 40 miles from Penzance to St Austell is fun, but the Truro to St Austell bit tedious and boring.
IoW is short, yet takes a little while to complete, because your max speed is so low. See Bakerloo as well. Doing most of it <30mph it takes a long time to actually cover a short distance.
Ultimately I would love to actually finish a Victoria/Brighton run without the game crashing/red lights bringing the thing to a end on me to say that its a good hour of run.
To me the "best route" for length an variability is TVL. Because it has all the different depots, sidings and train options, a two different 30 minute runs can be contrasting and different. It actually gives you the feel of "train sim world".
My one wish, and I will keep beating the drum, and I know it must be possible is that DTG give more branches to these mainline hauls. GWE and NTP are screaming out for branches. They have proven with London commuter that they (sometimes, ok often not, but if the wind is blowing in the right direction) can put hundreds of trains on at once. Give us the 40-60 minute mainline run, but the option of the 20-30 minute branch lines.
WCL gets it slightly with the St Ives line- even though it misses out the Falmouth Branch (a nice ~25 minute run!). ECW has the Seaford run too. Its a nice variation to the pounding up and down the mainline?

Oh I am waffling again

TTFN

D

 

For me, the Rush Hour routes, Dresden and BML about 50miles, Boston I think 43, are just about perfect in length and game play. I can do them in one session.
But Sand Patch is also fine, if you can split it in two parts. And one scenario on CRR took me about 3 hours total, but was so much fun I lost track of time.

In short, forget this mean, median, mode piffle. It all depends on the quality of the gameplay, scenery and how much fun the loco is to drive.

 

Indeed, like I said in my observations on Oakville, it's very much an outlier on length of the services, but what you get out of it is going to depend heavily on what you're looking for. Personally it's my go-to when I want something I can fit in when I have at most half an hour of free time, and as a result it sees more frequent play by me than most other individual routes just on that alone.

 

Personally I would love some really long routes, where there are many stops but the distance / time between them are long as well. Like LGV but with 10-15 stops, not 2. I like the feeling of travel, just to watch the scenery go by, even for hours. On a busy route the player has no time to enjoy the environment because they're too busy managing speed / safety systems / stops. So my ideal "long route" would be something of a high-speed line that's hundreds of kilometers long. I'm someone who likes to fly 3-4 hours in Flight Simulator in one go, just to see the world and the Sun go by, so I would absolutely love to do it in TSW as well. I know it would be an unrealistic amount of work but I still hope it happens some day. Maybe with a long Shinkansen ride or an expanded LGV one.

As for "short routes", I think the 40-50 minute mark is ideal for a busy route. When you constantly have to manage things, that amount of time is enough for one go.

 

They do both have their pros and cons, and yes it will really depend on the field you're trying to apply them to. Where the value of individual elements is important as well as the general average, such as "household income", you can get horribly skewed results if you use mean to describe the "average" person, as the significant clump of outliers at the top several orders of magnitudes greater than the main group pushes the mean way above what the vast majority of people actually earn (and thus the "average" is often extraordinary) - in this case the median is probably closer to the mark

If you're talking trends over time, or other situations where individual values are basically irrelevant and it is the overall "effect" that is desired, then the mean is more likely to be relevant than the median.

When in doubt, use all 3 (mean, median, mode), back it up with graphs, and explain your conclusions.

This is what I get for being an engineer whose mother was a high-school maths teacher.....