Hi everyone, I was just wandering we have double decker brand new trains in Australia that was built in South Korea and imported to Australia. I was wandering do you's still need approval from Australia to include the trains into the game or can you's use them from South Korea and use a South Korea map with it so there’s no licensing issues. Just after an answer around avoiding Australia licensing because Australia won’t approve it.
As I understand it, permission from the train's actual manufacturer is only required if said manufacturer has branding on the vehicle that could be featured. Think the Siemens branding being printed on the bufferbeam of the Vectron, a license from Siemens had to be obtained for that, and a separate one for all three Vectrons at that. However had they decided not to feature that little logo then Siemens would have never needed to be involved, the only license required would have had to be DB/Railpool/Flixtrain. To use another example, think of some of those American B movies. Quite often in those you'll see vehicles like Ford SUVs, but they'll very clearly have their company badges removed and an open space left. Except in rare cases, a company like Ford does not necessarily have a claim on the image of their car and therefor a license is not required to use it in something, the license is only for their logo. So in the case of the train you mention, approval and licensing would be required from the Australian TOC, or else it would have to be unbranded. The South Korean manufacturer would most likely never need to be involved. And as for putting it on a South Korean map so as to avoid Australian licensing... Freightliner or Colas won't grant permission for their branding, so shall we put the BR Class 70 on a Canadian map instead? I don't think that's ever going to happen.
That’s makes sense but like is there any possible way they could use it without the Australian branding even if it’s plain because I feel like there’s not enough double decker trains in the game and this one would be good to include.
America has plenty of double decker coaches available. If you managed to get the Caltrain addons before they were removed then you have two coach types there. Beyond that in other addons there are double decker MBTA, NJT, and two types of Metrolink. Outside of the USA however, the only other double deckers currently featured are Germany's Doppelstock. Legally speaking yes there would be nothing stopping them from making any train and route in Australia they wanted provided there was no branding or logos in sight. In terms of the community of this game however, past experience has shown that the lack of branding or the presence of fictional branding on a product (Think WCMLS and IOW2022) will cause half the community to figuratively murder the product, so it's highly unlikely.
