The beauty and design of this route is underrated. Yes it may not be everyone's cup of tea due to the speeds but I feel like this is the most stunning DTG route.
It’s certainly one of my favourite routes considering I’m not anywhere near the biggest fan of slow American freight in tsw sand patch grade has higher speeds and thats what I usually go for on other routes, but clinchfield seems like it manoeuvres better making it seem better than sand patch also the F7 I much prefer to other American freight which seems a bit copy and paste like especially concerning cab interiors scenery is certainly a positive for this route also
The problem with Clinchfield is twofold. First although the route looks lovely, after a while running through a steep tree lined valley with no distant views gets a bit tedious. Secondly many of the scenarios are wound tighter than a lead guitarists’ string, meaning the slightest deviation from the script such as running late or, in the case of Limited Power, trying to resume a saved game from before a certain event has occurred blows the whole thing up.
I mean, pretty much most US locos adopted the AAR style control stand, which is what most locos from both EMD and GE use, hence why most cabs look similar. There was a short period of the Desktop Control stands, but railroads eventually went back to the AAR control stands.
