Whenever I play LIRR and NEC: New York, I always wish that I could change between the routes.E.g. Drive an M7 into Penn Station and cross the station and hop on the next ACS: 64 leaving for Newark. If the game devs decided to add this to the game it would add SO much. I understand that loading two routes would be hard on the game but they could make half of Penn station LIRR and half NEC with a loading screen in the middle. This would open up the opportunity for future routes to be linked. As well as this, I have often found that I would like to explore the concourses of stations. E.g: Paddington, New York Penn, Manchester Victoria, Leeds etc. At many of these stations, there is already a loaded in area, it is just inaccessible. It wouldn't take much to expand the explorable area to include these concourses.
It would not actually be difficult to load two routes. The game engine only loads what's right around you. In fact, in order to make this work, it seems like the combined route would have to be a third route (or replace both of them). The relevant question to ask is what made it technically or financially difficult to create the routes as one thing in the first place? And why would they not upgrade NEC when they made the improved version of Penn Station for LIRR? Seems like they went through a lot of duplicate effort to create two versions of the same station and yard. There must be a reason why it didn't make sense to just add LIRR onto the areas of NYC they had already created.
Depends on how they made the tiles for the route and the station. IF they have created the station tiles in the same in game location then it wouldn't be that hard to link them together so you could end up with an ever expanding network going from the central point, but I don't know if they've done it that way. It would have been great had they picked a central "nexus" for each country and worked out from there (even in 40 or 50 mile increments) which would mean that each DLC would in essence be an extension to the existing routes. I guess that wouldn't allow for new/old though so you'd end up in a fixed timeframe