One thing that really bothers me with the American freight routes is just how empty the yards are. Sand Patch Grade's Cumberland Yard is almost entirely empty aside from maybe 1 or 2 manifest cuts in the departure yard and a few poorly mixed cars on the west end of the bowl. The power tracks are also fairly empty, especially around the turntable and shop area. It's a shame, because the route really does look pretty good. Same with the Sherman Hill. The route is really nice and does a great job capturing that flat Midwest look, but the yards are just so dead and really detract from the experience. I think one way to fix this would be to add static, maybe slightly worse looking cars all around the yard to really fill it up and make it look like it's actually busy. Even better, DTG could make a pool of all North American rolling stock (or at least cars that can be seen all across the country, not ones like CSX's Bethgons which are used exclusively for CSX coal trains, or NS ballast hoppers which are only used by NS Maintenance of Way), strip away all the complicated scripting, maybe lower the texture quality a little bit, and hook those up to a system that spawns a bunch of random cars on tracks that are not used in service mode until it decides to either end the string before the end of the track or fills up the entire pre-determined track length. Static engines could also be placed that just constantly emit either an idle sound or no sound, which would also depend on a random value. I just think that having at least some sort of yard filler to fill in some of the tracks would go a long way to adding more life into these routes.
It’s not just the US routes unfortunately. All routes have pretty empty yards in comparison to reality. Even GWE which had a makeover specifically to look busier still misses a ton of static stock
