Now Rivet Games are featuring the Class 170 with Fife Circle, this presents a good opportunity to finally produce a loco expansion for Birmingham Cross-City, a great route that really deserves more variety. These would operate hourly semi-fast services between Birmingham New Street and Bromsgrove, continuing onto Worcester and Hereford. Additional AI only services to Shrewsbury could also be included at Birmingham New Street, as well as driver training runs up to Lichfield for more things to do. West Midlands Trains operated 17 2-car Class 170/5 and 6 3-car Class 170/6 up until May 2023, being phased out and transferred to East Midlands Railway in favour of the newer Class 196 fleet. They operated across all WMT diesel routes, primarily out of Birmingham New Street but also occasionally on the Snow Hill Lines. All thoughts welcome.
Several opportunities for Rivet to do variations of the Turbostar for other routes. Probably too much effort though. I would think it is a worthwhile project.
If Skyhook can do it with the Class 158, then I don't see why Rivet cannot do something similar with the Class 170. It would make sense to get the most use out of a model to best recuperate the development costs, and as far as variants go the differences between the Turbostar subclasses are only fairly minor (e.g. seat moquette, livery, headlight cluster or buffer fairing/snowplough type).
This applies to multiple classes by DTG as well as third parties. Several types we have could do with extra variants to fill out other routes. Just Trains have proven this possible with multiple variants of the Class 142 Pacer in the BPO route.
Would be nice, however I think subject to licensing approval, a Cross Country variant would be more suitable. It can run as AI between Birmingham and Bromsgrove, with the additional capability to simulate the Nottingham & Derby services being diverted via Lichfield when the line through Tamworth is shut. It would also increase traffic on the Derby, Nottingham and Leicester route by Skyhook with 2 trains per hour in each direction between Nottingham and Derby, as well as increasing AI traffic between Syston and Leicester to represent the Birmingham, Cambridge and Stansted services
I agree, but given all Cross Country content had to be removed on TSC after Arriva was due to lose the franchise might make DTG a bit hesitant at having XC branding in their games again. Happy to be proved wrong though!
