Hi all, downloaded the brighton/Eastbourne route today, I already have the London commuter and I have to say I'm quite disappointed that you can't do London Vic to eaatbourne etc, yes I know its two different routes but it seems like a glaring ommision to me unless it's not technically possible to do.
Well, ecw was made before bml and you can't really do ecw services on bml cuz like you said, different routes. For that to happen, I would assume there would need to be timetable changes which isn't easy to do. Or a merge which is never going to happen which is even more complicated
Are you talking about services that would from Lewes to Eastbourne? If so, the reason is that there weren’t enough 377’s for DTG to replicate all the IRL services, so stuff such as these were cut. If you’re talking about Running from London all the way to Eastbourne, then I’m not sure where you got the idea you’d be able to do this.
Well for a start there is some missing railway in between the two routes. And whilst it is likely techincally possible that routes can be merged it has oft been said that there are not any plans to do so for the foreseeable future. It would be nice if it did happen one day. My main gripe with ECW is that they stopped at Eastbourne where most service go to Hasting or Ore, the Eastbourne to Hastings section I think has more interesting scenery too as some of it is actually along the coast.
I'm not a coder so I don't understand whether it's even possible or not, as I said, but it is a shame though that you can't go London Eastbourne
The services from Victoria to Eastbourne leave the Brighton mainline at Wivelsfield and the join ECW at Lewes. This track in between isn’t modelled on either route and since they don’t regularly go through Brighton station itself there seems little point in merging the two routes. Obviously it would be nice but they are a few years apart development-wise and probably incompatible.
Hey CK95 Can you explain more about that? I don't think you meant that literally DTG didn't have enough 377's to replicate all services from real timetable as they can replicate it as many times as they want after modeling it.
If they want to realistically create a fleet of units, they can’t actually replicate it as many times as they want. Only 75 377/4’s were built. I’m not sure how much of this fleet exists in TSW, but I imagine they did the full 75 units as they ran out again with BML. To get around this on BML, they reclassified 377/4 models as 377/1’s, which is how they got so many units.
Ah, ok, I get it, only 75 units of 377/4 has been build in real life, hence only 75 could also be replicated in TSW's ECW to match the reailty. I didn't know DTG take care of such aspect. Thanks for explaining that. I guess DTG couldn't reclass 377/4 to i.e. mentioned 377/1 to implement Lewes-Eastbourne services because it would also be inconsistent with the real life?
Funnily enough while is was downloading ECW I had a run on London commuter again and I was very impressed with how many AI trains were on the route.
They could implement the same approach to the issue with ECW, yes, but it depends if they wanted to. I think if we were going to see that happen though it would have been with the 313 timetable, which also would have made some 377/4’s available since they were all removed from the Seaford services. I’m not sure how Southern rosters their 377’s so I don’t know which subclass would run along ECW from the BML, but I’d have to assume that there are 377/1’s on the BML timetable which are running those services. Joe would be the best person to ask for specifics on how DTG handle this, since I’m not entirely sure how in-depth they’ve gone with the whole matter.
It's very much possible to code the timetables etc but as others have said the issue here (somewhat self imposed by DTG) is that they had made only one version of the 377 and there weren't enough of those to populate all the runs that would be needed so you either have double units (ie units with the same numbers which could possibly drive past each other) or you make some 377/1s number up at 377/5s and run them that way Either way (some) people would shout at them
I know the later /1s and /4s are very similar, but I am not sure if they're completely identical. I don't live in Southern land; do the later /1s have the doors between standard and first class? I'm also not sure how DTG added the /1s, if they added the numbers for the older versions with the triple lights at the ends then they're completely inaccurate (and almost as inaccurate as AP's idea of a Class 375 interior).
When Joe created the timetable, he didn't have enough 377/4s to create the full timetable. So, the /1 was made to make the rest of the services since it had similar headlights. Since dtg didn't have the time to create a fully accurate /1 variant, I think they just used the 377/4 and renumbered it so we can have the full 377 timetable (ai and playable).
Not having enough units available to make the full ECW timetable sounds bizarre. Couldn't they have plucked some units from the AI only Victoria services at Brighton (making them 8-car instead of 12-car) and used these on the Eastbourne - Victoria services? Whatever the reason, it would still be great to have timetable updates for the older UK routes in TSW (or a public timetable editor!).
Lovely photos. I would rather they concentrated on extending to Hastings/Ore rather than a link with BML personally. I know that is extremely unlikely however.
