To start of with, I find it very plain just hopping in the cab, setting up your train etc etc. When you could spawn in a place and walk or drive to the depot/siding to start driving, it would give it a realism boost of what actual life as a train driver experience is like. So there should be a feature where you could walk to the depot and find the train you are supposed to drive, or even if you spawn at a station you could walk to London Victoria for example for around 30s-1m and find the train you are supposed to take.
You can do that for services which start at the depot. But not many routes have that are the majority start/end in middle stations.
For instance on Peninsula I like to bring the train to Diridon station from depot, then switch from loco to cabcar and start to SanFrancisco service. All of this are separate services which can be combine by player.
I don't own that route but it sounds like something you can literally already do with free roam mode.
Free roam with passanger train is meaningless for me as you can't set stops and boarding the passangers... Passanger train means train for passengers.
I already made a similar suggestion once, where you do this in a kind of a manual approach. For example: Spawn a train anywhere where you're in "on foot" mode in timetable mode (not free roam) and then you got a menu or something to select which service you want to overtake at a certain departure. The tracks are kept free (from any AIs) for your train and it's your job to get the train positioned correctly at the right platform at the right time. But if I remember correctly Matt's answer to this was it would be too complex for the dispatcher system. But shrinking down my wishes, all what I would want is an offset time value for getting in the place before the timetable service starts, which basically gives you the time to inspect the train, check everything is set correctly and maybe enable the lights and heaters in the cabins. This would already enhance realism much for me personally and I think should be doable with how you set up timetables in Unreal Engine.
