Almost eight years ago, Milepost Simulations brought us the excellent Canadian Mountain Passes: Revelstoke - Lake Louise route onto the steam store as a DLC. The route itself offers significant challenges, gorgeous scenery, and a whopping 155 miles (250km) of track from Eldon, AB to Revelstoke, BC. The only place the route lacks in my opinion is, unfortunately, the variety of locomotives it offers or lack thereof. We get an ES44AC, which admittedly is some of the most common road power of Canadian Pacific as of the past few years. However, this leaves us with very little options in terms of scenario creation if we were to represent earlier eras on this route, and even the more recent additions to the Train Simulator Canadian Pacific fleet (AC4400CW by Searchlight Simulations and SD60 by Travel by Train) don't deliver in that regard. The AC4400 could conceivably be used in a 1990's scenario, but Canadian Pacific's SD60's were only renumbered and repainted from SOO Line colours within the past ten years and they are almost exclusively used on work trains and locals now, the latter of which don't exist on the route in real life as far as I'm aware (though I'm open to correction on that) and the former of which can't be represented at all with vanilla content. The thing is, Dovetail already has many of the necessary locomotive models to do this and little else would be necessary besides a retexture. In 2019, Dovetail released a Union Pacific SD9043MAC for use on the Granger Heartland route. Canadian Pacific was the owner of 61 such SD9043MACs numbered 9100 to 9160, they were almost exclusively 1990's units as their lack of reliability led to many of them being put into storage in the early 2000's. However, a handful were kept operating until the mid-2010's. We also can't forget the iconic SD40-2 of which Dovetail have provided in numerous paint schemes before, which Canadian Pacific owned 486 of and used extensively on mainline trains in the Rockies until the AC4400 and SD9043MAC fleet began to replace them in the mid to late 1990's. A handful left today are still used in work train and local service. There are also unique Canadian-only locomotive models which were used by Canadian Pacific that could make interesting additions to the steam store. The SD40-2F, for example, is an SD40-2 with a cowl-shaped carbody similar in appearance to the F45. Canadian Pacific owned a total of 25, all of which were built in Canada at the GMD plant in London, Ontario. Like the SD40-2, they found use on mainline trains until about the mid to late 1990's when more modern diesels began to appear. This also doesn't include the vast amount of units that Canadian Pacific leased during the 1990's when they were severely short on their own power, or the units that came from its SOO Line subsidiary when that company was consolidated with Canadian Pacific shortly thereafter. Needless to say, I think the addition of even one or two of the locomotives listed above would vastly increase the possibilities of scenario creation on the Canadian Mountain Passes route with minimal effort from Dovetail, at least as far as the first two suggestions are concerned.
It seems something happened with the images I used and they're not showing up, here they are in the order they were to appear in the post:
Strange, the first time I just copied and pasted the image. The second time I used the built-in image function which linked directly to the image. This time I've downloaded them and am uploading them as a file, we'll see if that works.
