First of all, I should say I've never once played conductor mode outside of that one scenario on the Glossop line. Personally I don't see the appeal of it. However I was watching the Riviera line preview and at the end of the stream Matt was playing in the conductor mode, and rejecting tickets to perfectly valid off route destinations such as Newbury and Cheltenham. In real life, passengers would be completely within their rights to travel on the train he was working on. They'd have to in order to get trains further afield. Matt also said something that really made me question how well he knows the route. When rejecting a ticket to Liskeard he said they were "going the wrong way". Did he forget that Paignton (barring the heritage railway) is a terminal station and that you have to go north in order to head south? Has conductor mode always been set up this way, where the only valid destinations are ones your train is calling at? If so that's very disappointing, and just another reason for me to not touch it. I know I wasn't interested to begin with, but surely I'm not the only one who finds it an immersion breaker??
It could be because of the dates and fact that some stations not listed because stations will only show in conductor mode for train your actually working
I said a while ago in a different thread that off map locations that the train stops at should still be valid as they could easily put a line under the final on map stop and text that reads "further off map destinations" or something like that. But I guess they have to keep it fairly simple so people who don't have a good geographical knowledge of the area can still get max points. You bring up the point of Newbury and Cheltenham, but not everybody is going to realise that that would be perfectly valid irl even if that particular train doesn't stop in those places. Again, if they made the ticket design read something like "Paignton to Newbury via Exeter" or something which is probably what it would say irl, then they could have passengers making connections because the player can then see that the NPC is (theoretically) using that train between Paignton and Exeter.
