With the ever-expanding amount of locos/trains and routes, it becomes more and more annoying that you cant drive your collection on the routes you want. Yes, you can create a scenario on the scenario planner but the SP is very limited, quite exhausting and lengthy to do for every time you want to play the loco on a different route. This is why a Manual Timetable Substitution is much needed. What I mean by that ominous name is the ability to take any service and be able to substitute any of your locos. Even if it just replaces the one service you chose, it'd still be a much needed addition for TSW3. One could even go as far as replacing every service on the same line with the player-chosen loco permanently (and not just for one game session), but I'd imagine that this would be more difficult to implement.
Good suggestion. Lets not forget an off-the-rails mode for this either. Such a feature would combine the best of TSC Quick Drive and TSW Timetable Modes together. EDIT: And it'd go well with a Consist Editor as well. Ultimate flexibility.
Completely agree with this. Often I start a service I haven't done in a while (usually German) and spend a while familiarising myself with getting going. To ensure I start on time, I restart the service, only to find myself in a completely different cab! Having the facility to manually pick from a list of available locos would be very useful.
There's a problem with the dispatcher / platform system at the moment whereby platforms stops have specific numbers of carriages allowed, so a four car stop is always a four car stop until someone changes the timetable. Would make it hard to have swap outs in the fashion you ask for
That's only a problem if you want it to be a problem. A three car unit or a five car unit can stop perfectly fine at a four car stop. A player can choose to ignore it and just stop wherever he wants to (it's not like action points are really worth anything anyways). Sure, it isn't "perfect", but it's better than having nothing.
There is the issue with a train instantly derailing if it is longer than the expected train and hangs over a buffer stop or a junction set against the line. The spawning of trains is done from the front of the train and not the whole train and is set in every service. If you think about how many services there are in all the routes, that’s a lot of spawn points that could potentially have issues if any train was allowed to be chosen. All of this could be solved but it’s whether DTG think it’s worth doing.
I believe it stops the passenger load / unload routine working, so if you want to stop at the first station and have no further instructions then "not a problem"
One scenario on every route within the scenario designer that's populated with a load of services that could be swapped out as the player pleases would do. Where one could replace a 4 car train with a 4 car train and so on. As the scenario designer stands at the moment it's a monumental waste of time.
With locos being disconnected from home routes in the future, I really hope that will be one of the features coming with it. Scenario Planner is a joke, and by no means comparable with what gets invested into the timetables (BML for example, good luck trying that in scenario planner). There are certainly restrictions on what can be replaced (e.g. train length), but this would be the highest priority thing for me to come to the game!
