PlayStation Wcmls: What Happened To The Class 87 Railtour?

When the updated timetable for the West Coast Mainline south was announced there was a mention of a Class 87 railtour. However now when when you go to the timetable menu it's not there. Did I miss something? Was it cancelled on all platforms due to performance reasons? I'm on PS5 and it should have the full timetable, right?

 

I think all the rail tours and shunting jobs have been put hold until the performance issues are sorted out

 

Because of how packed wcml is with all the different trains and services and assets, it uses a bunch of memory, meaning there isn't much left to support the railtours

 

The WCML only has about 800 services in total, including the layers. What I'll think likely is happening is some optimising performances. London Commuter performs very well despite having over 1000 services in its pattern as well as similar routes with an intense service pattern like Glasgow Central at CCC and Southeastern High Speed with a verity of services.

They're are still considerable missing services from the timetable itself from the missing Class 390 services, both playable and AI that should represent the real life current timetable as well as some Class 350 services (Notice the 2 hour gap for southbound Birmingham NS to Euston services in the afternoon, services are meant to be every half-hourly).

I don't think DTG should be prioritising adding the Class 87 first before fixing the missing Class 390 and 350 services. The whole purpose of this route for many is to have a realistic experience driving the route. We are still experiencing services arriving a few minutes early, that's because space is left in the timetable for the missing services that weren't developed in the end.

Sadly it may be a while before we get an update for the timetable in general, DTG seemed too focused away from the core playerbase and will shift away from realism to a certain niche market on the likes of 'Thomas the Tank Engine'. This will mean attracting those player bases who will have no experience on what it's like in a real life rail experience giving DTG the perfect excuse to not develop more realistic content, wheather that means incomplete timetables, incorrect route scenery or more fantasy stuff etc.

 

The amount of services and trains isn’t the entire issue. London Commuter has a bigger timetable and also has to model a busy London environment and two large terminals compared to WCML’s one. It may also be longer but I’m too lazy to check. Part of the reason WCML runs so poorly is poor optimization of the train models. The biggest cause of lag spikes in the original route was singularly the 350 PIS. I have not seen official acknowledgement of who was responsible for the logos, but there’s suspicion from modders who recognize the difference between the coding and style of the various developers that these memory hogging train models are the work of a specific developer, and honestly I kinda agree. Look at how the master key turns on in the 350 (click to turn on instead of drag) and you’ll see what I mean.

But no. It’s the train models that are causing performance issues and unless they resolve those, they’ll get flamed by 8th gen console players and lower end PC users for the 87 layer crashing their systems or turning WCML into a slideshow or texture mush