New To Ts2020 (etc.) Shopping List In March Sale

Yeah - Soldier Summit & Salt Lake City was on a very cheap sealed TS2019 DVD-ROM (with working code), which will go with my Norfolk route from my TS2020 download. I also bought Horseshoe Curve - but only for the Aerotrain (although I run the Aerotrain everywhere else but Horseshoe...... LOL...).

I am expecting/hoping these two freighters (Soldier and Norfolk) to provide a proper simulation of heavy freight trains. And I also hope that CSX:HH on TSW will have some value in this area too. I haven't tried any of them yet.. as my simming time has recently been savaged by the need to monitor the FTSE.... ;-O ;-)

I am quite interested in horseshoe and staircase routes.... for the gradients, and potential for really nice screenshots... ;-)

But when the next sale is on... I might well be back looking for more advice on US routes, and Montana is on my short-list. Although I would love a New Mexico/Arizona copper mining simulation..... with very heavy loads on relatively short trains... Gotta love coil carriers and Cu slab carriers - short and heavy would make switching more bearable for me....

 

I'm pleased to report that the class 89 is pretty decent, 4k uhd YouTube video below:



Does anyone know if the unit is still at Barrow Hill Roundhouse? The little one and I are well overdue a visit there, the old couple that run the cafe make delicious bacon cobs too

 

Oooh - you are a tease.... It is tempting.... but when Alan Thomson is slating the loco, even though he wants to make £CA$H from it... then I think I have to wait for it to be finished/fixed. So I think I will have to wait a few years for it.... And anyway - if I get the 89 and the route, I will only go hunting for the 91 and every other bit of rolling stock that has been scenario'd for it, and then I'd want the other route parts to York and Edinburgh....

So - I should wait for a sale.... and I have far too much other stuff to be occupied with for now....

....but I was tempted.....

IRL - the 89 was seen at Barrow a few months ago - either decked out in primer (or rust-proofing for very cold storage).... or it is in a new shade of the Network Rail livery.... ;-O

 

The 89 will be awesome once AP (Armstrong Powerhouse) do a pro sound pack, and once I've completed a cab interior upgrade pack. I'm still working on the second pack for the 125, the first pack was received really well and I think is currently sitting at almost 700 downloads so far.

For the sake of driving a loco I've seen IRL so many times, with my daughter along for the mission, the 89 is pretty decent. If it were perfect, I'd have nothing to work on I would say that it's worth the punt at £11.99. It's just literally unique.

The 91 is essential, as is the full length of the ECML. You can get a route merge at Alan's website but I haven't driven the whole length of it yet - though it's been installed for ages now. With just so much content to enjoy, it's difficult to give everything fair dues.

When you have the 43, 91, 89 etc, AP enhancement packs are highly recommended. Even for the 303, the horn alone is worth the asking price. Check it out if you have a fiver spare, it transforms the loco and preps it for the awesome Suburban Glasgow route (not an easy install but worth the effort).

Also, check out my HST cab enhancement pack, it's free and it'll save the kuju model for you. Those rivets really are shameful.

 

I'm reminded of a scene from the superior tv sit-com Fawlty Towers where Basil Fawlty says. "A satisfied customer, we should get him stuffed."
synthetic.angel keep the humour coming, it's needed here.

 

*blushes*

 

Wait until the day your copy of TS20 just *stops* working for no reasonable reason, and then you spend 3 full days reinstalling 200GB of dlc and hundreds of mod patches and fixes.



And it still doesn't work.

So you go as far as having to create a new partition on your HDD, reinstalling Steam, then TS20, then the patches and fixes, taking another 3 days.

The Mastery challenge on offer here is Patience The reward? A small slice of madness.

You will never be the same again.

 

I have noticed that TS2020 can be quite unstable. I think the first check is always to check your internet connection - a drop-out in some situations will not just freeze the game's UI, but it will lock the PC out completely (even CTRL-ALT-DEL.......)... It's a really vicious bug..... Really really nasty Windows UI programming...

.....but oddly, it's not as frustrating as getting useless system messages that need to be acknowledged before TS2020 will let you take the next action, which is to acknowledge another useless system message... and for those system messages to physically appear behnd the full-screen windows for TS2020 and Steam, but procedurally be the active windows.... totally nuts..... So you can acknowledge without seeing them, but if you want to see them, then you have to alt-tab through to them.... seriously.... totally nuts...

... but I expected this sort of malarkey on PC (although not quite as extreme), so I won't be reporting it..... It is quite astonishing to see it though... in a UI that has been presumably "developed" for over a decade...?

I can have quite a lot of patience. I once had to rebuild a FAT table by hand, and from memory.... to recover stuff on a HDD after a virus trashed it.... that took about two days...... thankfully it was all in 16 bit... and I had a sensible directory structure that I was familiar with... back in the days of XtreeGold.... ;-)

 

Personally I used to find that for driving trains in TS1 the game would run fine 99% of the time but the editor was another story, it would crash all the time. If I was creating a scenario with the editor I'd have to make sure I was saving it constantly. I say "was" as I haven't played it for quite a while but I imagine it hasn't changed a lot since then.