Hello, with the PS sale on I was thinking of buying some DLC, but I'm not sure which ones are worth picking up and which ones are not, here are the ones on sale I don't own: Oakville Subdivision Hamburg-Lubeck BR Class 484 Long Island Railroad Luzern-Sursee RHB anniversary collection Any recommendations will be welcome, cheers.
For me, of those you’ve listed, I would only recommend the Class 484. I’ve not played Oakville for months so can’t really remember that, but for the others. Hamburg Lubeck is in my opinion the worst of the German Routes. Nothing much wrong with it, it’s just a bit boring. Long Island is not really my thing anyway but, it’s an old route and to me it looks it. Luzern Sursee is good on TSW2, but a lot of services are broken on TSW3. Rivet have acknowledged this, but don’t seem to be in any hurry to fix it. The route itself is well done and the train is nice to drive. But some people have issues with the safety systems. A lot of people complain about the loco sound, but I’ve been on it. a lot and it seems ok to me. Not much fun in the dark though. RhB Anniversary collection- Requires Arosa Line. If you already have that and like the route and if it’s really cheap in the sale, it gives some new liveries and scenarios. Fun but not a must have. Class 484 - A short route, but Rivet have done really well with this one. It’s one of my most played routes. The scenery and train are both well modelled. The only thing broken with it is the Mastery doesn’t seem to be working and DTG seem to have given up on fixing it. I’d recommend this one though.
Oakville is a short, fast freight route. So you no longer have to spend 1hr30min going end to end. End to end services on Oakville is around 30 min and you can go quite fast (50+ i believe) and mostly flat. It was advertised as a switching route but there's very little switching and more full length runs. So if you like fast, short American freight, oakville is for you. Hamburg-Lubeck: it's mostly straight, flat route. Doesn't have like a wow factor. The 112 is quite poor to drive, wrong dostos, but it's not terrible. You get a mrce 182 for freight but that's about it. It got a new Joe timetable so it should be a bit busier. 484. It's much better than the original iow. More detailed scenery, new platforms and track like the new thing, etc. It's short and relaxing. It's one of the better rivet routes. However the livery is semi fictional b/c rivet couldn't get an swr license. Rivet has been in talks with them but haven't given an update on whether they were successful. Lirr is really poor. It only has like 100-200 services I believe cuz of signaling issues so it's a dead and quiet route. The m7 isn't great. You can buy the m3 but that's not great either. It doesn't even look like new York. Harlem line is like 100x better than lirr. It's better to not get this route Luzern-sursee. It's short (24km) and takes around 30 minutes to complete. The rabe 523 has extremely limited interactive controls so many buttons can't be used. Etcs can be a problem. It's also one of the better rivet routes. It's also poor in terms of performance. I get like 15-20fps lower than other routes i play. Rhb anniversary. It's a nice addition to arosa. You get like 5 liveries, couple scenarios, a new observation car and an extra timetable with Christmas themed services. If you like that, you could get it. But at the same time arosa isn't the best out there.
Hamburg-Lübeck has integrated most of the train layers of all TSW routes yet. Provided you have all the German DLCs, you can drive almost anything here. Rivet's routes, including the Class484, are always made with great attention to detail, but are also a bit short. For example IOW 2022 features a cool hovercraft or Luzern-Sursee has beautifully designed house facades around the Luzern main station and an IKEA market. LIRR has gotten a bit old in the meantime and can't quite keep up with the freshly released TSC version. Oakville Subdivision recently got a big preservation update. It should also get a passenger layer soon if you own the Baby Bullet DLC. I also added a screenshot example for all HBL train layers, really a lot!
Oakville is not that bad, as stated above unlike SPG where every other Journey run seems to be 80 minutes of shuffling cars in Cumberland Yard, most of it is main line runs. Both the locos are quite with good sounds and horns. It's a useful route if you want a quick blast without having to keep coming back to finish. After picking up Oakville very cheap in a sale I pretty much scoffed at and ignored it. But one evening I fired up a run and now I keep coming back. It looks quite nice in TSW3 and very atmospheric in poor weather conditions. None of the other routes I own, LIRR I refunded as it was utter garbage, wouldn't even pay £5 for it. Arosa, well it is Rivet loads if shortcomings and other than the timetable nothing the TSC route doesn't already offer, though I appreciate not an option on console.
Oakville doesn't get a lot of love on the forum, but like OldVern said earlier, you find yourself coming back to it, I do too, and would also recommend it. Luzern-Sursee - one of my favourite routes, I spent a year working in Switzerland in 2020 and they absolutley nailed the 523, it sounds and looks like it does in the flesh, I know a lot of the controls aren't functional, but for me that's a minor niggle and I find it a very good route with varied landcscape and stations. Would be nice if they could add more rolling stock to it though.
Back to Oakville... Quick go yesterday evening and the Journey mode where you have to fill the ethanol tanks. Great fun as not only do you have to position the tank cars correctly, you need to alight from the loco and walk up on the overhead gantry to put the bulk loader in after opening the trapdoor on top of the tank cars. Of course in reality the driver/engineer would not be responsible for that but a nice bit of role playing, nonetheless. If only the route extended to Toronto at one end and Niagara or Buffalo at the other.
...the ICE M runs directly from Hamburg to Lübeck and vice versa. It's actually just a replacement for the BR101 IC services. Nowadays there are no more IC services on this route, only RE trains and these are meanwhile driven with blue-green Twindexx Vario trains. Also the freight trains have essentially remained the same as before, only the train locomotives have been substituted. Nonetheless, it provides a lot of variety.
I love Oakville! Being a CN fan and being the one and only Canadian route they have, it’s right up my alley. I play it quite often and enjoy it every time. As has been stated one of the nice features about it is it’s not just all switching and slow yard movements. Often, after completing a switching session there’s a good 3-10 mile long high speed run that really gets the juices flowing. And a further bonus for me is that the stuff I’ve painted in livery designer shows up in the game either on AI trains or in the yard and often in your own consist. It seems to me it’s the only route that does this on a regular basis I also have Cajun Pass and Clinchfield and though you can run custom locomotives in timetable you never see the custom painted rolling stock. In Oakville it just shows up whether you’re in scenario, journey, or timetable which is a beautiful feature to this particular route. The only drawback with Oakville is that the locomotives are not yet available in livery designer. If it’s on sale - buy it. You won’t be out full price and will not regret it. It may not be what you’re used to but you will come back to it. It’ll grow on you.
Would be good to know which other DLC you like to have a better idea of what your tastes are... Of the ones I have: I like LIRR. Especially since the recent updates. But it would probably be my last choice. The one flaw with it is that the route does seem pretty dead as far as AI services around you... in real life it should be one of the busiest routes in North America but in game you can do full runs and maybe see 2 or 3 other trains in a peak time, and nothing from outside the route layers in (i.e. no Amtrak trains come by on the parts where you should be able to see them). This is just due to it being an old route where they can't do as much without rebuilding it from scratch. If you have/like Harlem Line these are basically the same trains on a different route. I actually prefer the route geography on LIRR but the timetable on Harlem is waaay better and makes the route more alive. LIRR is one of the oldest routes in the game and it shows. ---------------------------------- Class 484 is very good and pretty new. I can't really find anything bad to say about it as far as bugs or anything. The only thing about it is if you don't like a relatively short/slow route you might not like it. And there isn't much variety since every service is the same Ryde-Shanklin. Can't knock it for that since that's what the real life route is but it might not be one you play over and over because it never changes. I own the older version of Isle of Wight too and much prefer the 484 one because the visuals of the route are better and the 484 is a nicer train to drive IMO. ---------------------------------- Oakville is nice because it is a different experience to other US freight. Instead of super long runs grinding up and down steep hills this is a pretty flat route in an urban area dealing with industries and shunting. I like it especially being Canadian but it does have some flaws. The main thing is that in real life that route is full of commuter trains/GO Transit, which isn't in the game due to licensing. So if you know the real area it feels weird to have it not have ANY passenger trains going through. If you don't know the real area/don't care thats not an issue. I played this route a lot when I was mainly a US freight player but sometimes didn't have the time to sit down for 1-2 hours on a big route. Oakville you can play the longest services in like 30-40 min. It would be a good intro to the style of US freight locos before buying one of the big complicated routes like Sherman Hill/Horseshoe/Sand Patch/Cajon Pass ---------------------------------- Hamburg - I can't say too much because I just started playing the German routes and have barely touched it. But one thing about the German stuff is that if you want to play German stuff its best if you have ALL of the DLCs since they all add layers and services and locos to eachother, which is the great thing about German routes. They all feel super alive when they are all installed. So thats why I own it but I haven't actually played it much yet. So yeah long story short they are all decent for the sale price but not the routes I'd be rushing to pay full price for. If it was me and I had to take one I would probably either get Hamburg or Class 484/Island Line.
Funny thing is those services show up on TSW3 for me but on TSW2 the Ice doesn't pop up as an option. I didn't notice when this started so I am assuming its related to the add on manager.
I know most people does not like Hamburg Lubeck. As you can see above. But for me it is a nice route. Yes it is flat, but it has some interesting things: - You have big departing and arriving passenger terminal. It was the first one! - You have proper separate freight terminals at both sides. Even the one at Hamburg, it has a dedicated branch line, with very interesting visuals around including several bridges and a pipeline beside it. Even with the last update, some static Dostos and freight cars were added. - There are timetables where you drive a freight train, but you have to wait at a passenger station on a separate track, for 2 passenger trains to pass by. This does not happens on other routes. - As Sparmi has showed, if you have other DLC's you have plenty of different trains and locomotives to drive there. - Futhermore on Creator's Club you have lot of interesting Scenarios using all kind of trains. Even ones not specific for this route. So I recommend it to you.
It appears that this only works now in the tutorial- everything else, the valves are disabled and instead the instruction reads "wait 20 minutes"
I noticed that on my subsequent run, though it was 10 minutes not 20. I did wonder what the scenario author expected us to do for 10 minutes. One instance where the activity should have been scripted to jump forward, "Some 20 minutes later..." then get your next instruction.
Worse yet, the score/medal levels were calculated based on getting AP for each tank car filled, as with coal loading- now it's impossible to get gold.
Yeh they are starting to wind me up too. The worse ones are where you are asked to wait 10 minutes to receive instructions then after 10 minutes the instructions are for another wait. It may be realistic but unlike real drivers we are not being paid. We are paying with money and our limited spare time. A skip option would be ideal.
