There was discussion on the streams recently of perhaps regarding the hurdles to upgrade the dispatcher for Bakerloo as too great to cross, and delisting the increase of Bakerloo services from the roadmap. I would like to ask that you do not alter your priorities as abandoning the effort to increase rail traffic would seriously effect the realism of Bakerloo and many future routes. Removing the development of the Bakerloo upgrade makes me fear that LIRR and Bakerloo in their current states are representative of any future busy metropolitan line developed for TSW2. That is not a future I would want to see TSW2 go through. Nor is it one that would make me immediately excited to see a busy metropolitan route appear on the roadmap. Both LIRR and Bakerloo are incredibly weakened in impact by their extremely noticeable lack of services in timetable mode. Their wings are effectively clipped in my mind. Despite being a huge fan of the LIRR route and the M7 (I'd argue that maybe both could be my favourite); the lack of traffic is specifically why I did not purchase the M3 and haven't played LIRR in a long while. The route felt not only felt dead because of a lack of actual traffic density (especially on the 4-track sections), but also because the knowledge that nowhere near the huge numbers of trains seen in real-life are represented. If LIRR were to get a timetable upgrade I would easily purchase the M3. Bakerloo theoretically has the advantage of being only half above ground, but with that only a portion of services travel along that section because some turn back underground at Queens Park. So that advantage is then eliminated. It again is a route and has a train I love, but it needs to feel alive, and active, and real for me to feel not dissatisfied. I had been holding back playing as many services as I could, and collecting all the things on it because I was waiting for this upgrade. My favourite routes in real life and in train simulation are most often very busy inner-city routes, with passing lots of trains, or lots of trains passing me, and the very real risk of red lights just ahead. It all makes it alive and exciting and enjoyable. Experiencing them represented realistically and accurately in terms of traffic is incredibly important. Please keep working through the current problems with the dispatcher and Bakerloo timetable, or please keep it on the roadmap at least. Thank you for reading.
I agree, abandoning these things now would be bad and could result in less players purchasing the game
More timetable services on LIRR, including the new M9 train would be super cool. I doubt Bakerloo will see the additional timetable services. It seems the dispatcher is just not clever enough to assign trains to specific platforms to enable increased capacity.
While I don't see a point of adding more services to bakerloo for us to drive (there are already so many services to chose from), I definitively agree that it often feels very empty out there and having more trains would mean more life. For some routes I believe they are as empty in real world as they are in the game, but most do see a bit more traffic - I would expect. Often that is not possible to implement as they run different rolling stock and onto other routes, but when I recently started playing LIRR I was surprised of how empty it felt, after all the hype of a busy route and driving on america's most used system.
A big part of the dissatisfaction is the knowledge of how lacking compared to reality the routes are. This can be known either by being aware of the real-life operations of the route, or it can present itself in-game when there are sections of multiple underutilised parallel tracks, stations with huge numbers of platforms but a service every 10-20 minutes, and an inner-city metro setting. So in routes where the timetable is realistic the dissatisfaction doesn't present itself because things are the way they should be and the route in real-life is deigned for that real capacity (most of the time - sometimes there can be remnants of a former hey-day but that's not so common).
I agree that they shouldn't abandon the expansion of the Bakerloo Line timetable, but if the dispatcher can't handle it, then they can't spend months trying to make it work. I do agree that the lack of trains do make the Bakerloo line dead. The LIRR timetable was modeled inaccurately for the Hempstead and Ronkonkoma branches as well and I'm saying that as a person who uses the Hempstead branch for the past 10 years. Lack of passengers as well makes the BKL feel dead as well and this simulator doesn't replicate how busy the Bakerloo line would be passenger wise. It captures how dead it would be during a pandemic though.
I certainly don't think the plan should be abandoned as the core needs to be updated to support any future route with an intensive timetable. I don't think we need every train in the working timetable to run on the Bakerloo but a 10 minute frequency between Queens Park and Elephant and Castle should surely be possible and keeps the waiting time if you decide to train jump in Timetable Mode to a reasonable amount. Either that or introduce some sort of time acceleration when not driving to speed up the wait!
While there are tons, there is no real set service pattern, and yes it does feel empty as you said- 20 minutes between trains to Stonebridge Park? For me, acceptable, but not acceptable.
but you dont need to do such assigning on the bakerloo excluding at elephant and castle and in the sheds
I would that DTG take a turn from realism and make it so, to clear space at elephant and castle (which is surely the bottleneck preventing more services) to make trains do a similar turnback at elephant as to the one at Harrow where in, trains preform the turnaround in the sidings just beyond the station, this would be plausible for Elephant
I too am bummed that Bakerloo line services upgrade face elimination. This is currently my favourite route and seeing it losing interest to make it more alive and closer to reality is really disappointing. So I upvote the OP's appeal to continue the project.
While they could do that at E&C, I imagine Queen's Park is more of a headache because it has a combination of terminating and non-terminating trains. I would be fine if they managed to buy themselves more time for the dispatcher upgrade by doing some clever timetabling to increase the amount of services on Bakerloo, but that still doesn't solve the problem of existing and future routes busy routes being compromised. Also clever timetabling would take a lot of manual set-up time as well. A new dispatcher is much more robust, future proof, and value-adding.
Just another thought; The lack of a new dispatcher also strongly limits or eliminates the chance for future layering on to routes with potential future content. Such as Overground trains on Bakerloo, or a DE30, freight, or other Penn traffic on LIRR. The lack could also potentially eliminate the chance of possible layers with other existing content like layering ICE3 trains where appropriate on some busy German routes (MSB, RSN, etc.).
Yes I understand these are kind of starting to sound like the desperate ramblings of a madman but the way the Bakerloo service mode upgrades were talked about it sounded like it needed a desperate sound of support. Here's a cab ride video to keep people occupied: I counted 7 visible passing underground trains between Harrow & Wealdstone and Queens Park (with 1 in the reversing siding of Queens Park). Also this obviously doesn't count whatever services are in front of the driven train or potentially in the H&W reversing siding, there definitely is at least 1 other train as there are couple of yellow signals along the way. Also of note the service starts at 4:30pm so not at peak times. This lines up with Wikipedia: Of note with how the game functions: In-game there are several hours without any Stonebridge Park service. Right now in-game a maximum of 9 trains that run at a time (unless one of those running trains is waiting in a reversing siding or depot. Most of the time at least 1 is in a siding). I am of course ignoring the ECML and Overground traffic as that is absolutely understandable why it does not exist at the moment. That being said; If the stock does exist in the future it's absence from the route can be noted. (I do understand that the ECML track is not set up to support traffic in its current state. It would be appreciated and nice to see some kind of minimum retrofit so even only a double track section of the ECML line that can support 1 train in either direction at a time is functional). There is 2 gronks in the video, at 10:51 and 17:17, and I know ECML has some Class 66 freight traffic so there already is some foundation for future possibilities. For anyone curious about the other passing trains though I also counted 4 Overground services and 8 ECML services (and that's with the visual obstructions).
The trains that would account for all the extra services on the Bakerloo line ironically are in the route itself. The trains are at london road depot and Stonebridge park depot but don't move because they have no services. There are 6 trains at London Road Depot that don't move due to no services for those trains and there are 13 trains at Stonebridge Park Depot that don't move either because of no services for any of those trains. So in total there are 19 trains in the Bakerloo line that don't move because they have no services. They just need to upgrade the dispatcher to get those trains moving or maybe they can add a few more services to the timetable as a compromise if they can't get all the services to work