Hi all, now that the Class Kb has released I thought I might talk a little. The Kb is built by NZTS Workshops and is homed on the Midland Line (New Zealand South Island). The route has been out for a few years and has electric, diesel and steam content available for it. It presents a scenic single line journey with plenty of passing and shunting opportunities. The route well represents the area of landscape that I've visited personally a few years ago. The landscape is rugged, harsh and largely empty of people exactly as it should be. The Kb is a mighty machine and is a coal variant of the sister machine the oil burning Ka used on North Island with one key difference. The Kb operates in mountainous challenging territory with heavy loads and has a fairly unusual feature. The bogie under the cab that supports the weight of the firebox also has a steam powered low speed booster engine built into it. This small engine can make the difference between getting a large load up a hill and not making it over the top stalling out on the grade especially climbing out of Springfield. The Kb is part of the TS Pro line meaning that you do need some idea of what you're doing to manage the machine and drive it to its full capabilities. Don't let that scare you though, once you get the hang of prototypical operation and make use of the excellent manual and my tutorial on YouTube you will be good to go. If you do need any help NZTS are ready to help and you can find them at https://www.facebook.com/NZTSWorkshops/ A unique feature of the Kb for TSC is that it has a series of genuine Kb whistles all recorded live. There are long and short whistles and the script cycles through them so every time you blow you get something new! The locomotive has comprehensive controls and nearly everything can be activated by the player. It supports both automatic and manual firing. Misusing the oiler or booster engine will cut your trip short as its possible to damage or even disable the locomotive. The brain behind this amazing machine is Stefan van Vliet. The braking system utilises a script developed from the work of Smokebox (Mike Rennie) and Stefan thanks him for his great help with this project. I've personally operated the Kb with Keyboard & Mouse (trackball), Controller and Raildriver. Make sure you use CTRL-R to activate Raildriver mode so the brakes lose their notches. The machine has strong smoke and steam emitters and great sounds right at the limits of TSC's capabilities. This limits how many Kb's you can have active on the line so the Kb comes in three main versions, each of which has three liveries: Player, AI and Dead. AI machines only emit when they're moving and dead ones are for scenery. The three liveries are clean, weathered 1 and weathered 2 representing hard working heavily used machines. You don't just get a locomotive though, you get about 12 hours of fairly intense game play for your cash with five scenarios Coals for Linwood - a down hill run from Arthur's Pass to Springfield Railfans Go West - a railfan special late in steam life Evening Escapades - most freight on Midland ran at night and this one is a down hill run in the dark adding an additional challenge to the steep grades Winter Worries and King of the Mountain taking a big load up hill from Springfield to Arthurs Pass The Class Kb is even famous being the subject of a film called "Kb Country" A member of the NZTS Workshops community even reproduced KB Country using TSC! You can see that at I wonder if this is the first time TSC has been used to make a historical re-enactment? Stefan has kindly given me permission to talk about the beta experience and give you a bit of a behind the scenes look. I first encountered the Kb around April 2022 as the first version was unleashed on the NZTS Workshops beta community. I eagerly downloaded the locomotive and set about manually installing it into TSC. The early versions had their quirks and the inevitable OOM (out of memory) errors from TSC as the locomotive drives the engine right to its limits and often a little bit beyond. As each issue was encountered and reported by the beta crew a new version would drop and around the circle we'd travel. Over time the issues with the machine were resolved and we started to get into the scenarios as they developed suggesting game play ideas, detecting issues and making bug reports. Sometimes during scenario play we'd detect new issues with the machine that would get corrected. I have to say the beta process is fun because you're dealing directly with the developer and can make a case for why you think something is important and influence the outcome and final product. As part of my testing I built quite a few of my own scenarios for Midland Line. Later in the development process it was time to ambassador the Kb and show the world. I used both Kb native and my own scenarios streaming the early access version of the Class Kb. Is being in a beta team always fun? Well no, sometimes things go boom or not quite as planned and you cannot complete a run which is always a bit frustrating and doing it repeatedly can tire you about a bit. The effort is well worth it because everything the beta time finds is something you will not encounter and you do get the warm fuzzies knowing you're helping develop the best possible product. Just in case I only tell you about the good things, is the final result perfect? No, nothing really ever is, but its an excellent driveable and enjoyable machine. So if you're ready to take on something challenging in a country outside the three, then give the Kb and Midland a go. The Class Kb is available from Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/2202024/Train_Simulator_New_Zealand_Kb_Class_Steam_Loco_AddOn/. Midland Line itself has quite complex scenery that is being revised by NZTS Workshops currently and the works to date have made amazing changes to the framerate. Keep an eye out for a route update announcement in the future once this transformation is completed. Midland line has two other major locomotive DLC: The Dj diesel and the Ja Steam Locomotive. All three are Pro level machines. Hopefully we'll see DTG Jamie take on this mighty beast live in the near future! Disclosure: I am both a NZTS Workshops Ambassador and DTG Ambassador and I received the Kb for free as a beta tester.
Thanks for sharing these informations Paul, put this on my wishlist. Good to hear that a very much needed scenery update is being worked on, I still can only play Midland with lowest Scenery Density and Quality to get a bearable framerate, and much of the vegetation looks like it were hand painted and too bright.
Yes it definitely needed an update. I've been running and streaming with the updated route and I've gone from quite low frames to 40s to 60s most of the time with some places 100+ so I'm really happy with the progress.
