...or smaller formations, as 3.5 hours to complete a service which should take an hour and twenty four minutes is a bit much. I spent over an hour and a half crawling up a 2.1 gradient, before the engine shut itself down and I ended up having to ditch half of my train just to make it up the hill.
This is where banking comm would have been helpful which was never implemented. That way you can have trailing locos and go up the incline.
Agreed, the ability to request banking locomotives via the radio would be a great feature in situations like this, but as you point out, with no functioning banking comms they would just add more weight
I have no idea why DTG thought A-B-A formations were appropriate for going up the hill. It’s truly terrible to drive those services. I feel like they’d have to use A-B-B-B-A formations to make the services more bearable.
In this case banking comm refers to the actual link between the locos in the consist to work in multiple, or DPU mode.