Trainz 2019 Review

[Cristoforo Kanoy]

The appeal of trains: Rhythm. Racket. Clatter. Squeal. Sway. Jolt. Hiss. Bellow. Thrum. Gleam. Glint. Grime. Rust. Musk. Power. Precision. Toil. Stoicism. Blue-collar heroes. Uncomplaining beasts of burden. Giant steampunk millipedes. Countryside cleavers. Smoke wreathers. J. M. W. Turners. Midnight diadems. Tortured troglodytes. Reminders of a vanished world. Childhood's branchline. Life's express. Speed. Anticipation. Departure. Arrival. Exoticism. Mundanity. Predictability. Personality. Possibility. Peace. Pace. Onwards. Onwards.

If Trainz: A New Era was a British train service I'm pretty sure users would be eligible for a partial refund. The latest instalment of this fourteen-year-old rail simulator franchise introduces some promising kinetic and aesthetic advances, but serious performance problems and a slim and lumpy selection of default content renders much of the progress moot.

Switching from Dovetail's TS2015 to N3V's TANE at the moment, is a bit like trading a fleet Class 55 for a fagged-out Class 08. In surroundings where I'd expect 40-50 frames a second in TS I'm often lucky to get ten in TANE. Savaging view distance, shadow sophistication, and vegetation detail does help a little, but leaves the newcomer looking a lot like Trainz: The Old Era. If next Monday's patch fails to deliver the "significant performance improvements on most hardware configurations" promised, TANE risks being consigned to that part of my mental marshalling yard where urban foxes doze and brambles twine round points levers.

Which would be a shame. When the sim isn't dawdling like an 'OO' gauge Garratt on dirty track, or cocooning me in the cab of a disagreeably dated loco model, it's often offering tantalizing glimpses of the born-again Trainz Kickstarter contributors were encouraged to expect. Watching tree and telegraph line shadows filigree the shiny flanks of a speeding express? Lovely. Craning out of a cab window to observe coupling chains tighten, wagons buck and rock, and uncannily realistic exhaust plumes billow? Agreeably novel. And hats off to N3V for having the guts to include a GreatWar-era Australian line in the route folder.

The basic 30 edition of TANE comes with four venues, that Victoria Railways line, a framerate-crippling chunk of 1950s West Virginia (Hinton Division), a model railroad-style contemporary US route (Kickstarter County) and a Brit-pleasing depiction of the East Coast Main Line circa 1976.

With the possible exception of the latter none of these boast quite the attention to detail of the best TS2015 routes. Too often rural sections feel repetitive or bare, Speedtrees hastily sprinkled. Have N3V reserved their best work for the deluxe edition and DLC? I can't say for sure, but having explored one of the four 27 payware expansions (the solid but musty Season Town) I think it's unlikely.

Each of the four routes comes with free roam and multiplayer invitations, a disappointingly meagre selection of scenarios, and a nice 'next gen' loco equipped with atmospheric mouseable cab. The contrast between the crisp interiors of the dbutantes, and the dated dashboards of the locos inherited from older Trainz versions is striking and underlines an awkward truth: TANE's 'New Era' is not all-encompassing. The sim is littered with stuff - textures, models, sound effects, camera controls... still in need of modernisation. Until community craftsmen start exploiting the capabilities of the new engine and N3V work out how to wring more speed from it, TANE is probably only going to be of interest to series loyalists and frustrated railway modellers (The route editor is as friendly and flexible as ever).

I pity the PC wargamers that missed out on the Golden Age that was the 1990s. They'll never know what it's like to open a pristine box and discover a weighty spiral-bound manual, a vast glossy map, and a happy-to-hotseat pygmy marmoset dressed as Napoleon. They'll never know what it's like to buy a WW2 tactics title featuring multiple fronts. The days when you could slip from Normandy beaches and Belgian hamlets to Belarusian birch woods and Ukrainian collective farms without first spending a small fortune on expansions are long gone. We won't see their like again.

Well, not for a month or two, anyway. Nine years in the making, Tigers on the Hunt is what happens when one man - a man called Peter Fisla - realises that the Advanced-Squad-Leader-meets-Steel-Panthers-meets-Close-Combat battle sim he dreams of playing, probably won't get made unless he sits down and jolly-well codes it himself. What began in 2006 as a straight PC port of ASL has, over the past decade, morphed into something a lot less loyal and legally problematic.

Two-minute turns, hex centres a mere 40 metres apart, and counters representing individual vehicles, squads, half-squads, and weapon teams, should give TotH the granularity it needs to stir memories of its illustrious/intimate inspirations. Hopefully, a carefully crafted dynamic AI and a deeply entrenched command-and-control mechanism (expect nailbiting activation checks) will mean it generates surprises and stories as energetically as its touchstones too. Peter estimates that at least one of those nine dev years has been spent writing and rewriting AI routines.

Pacific, Blitzkrieg, and early Desert War scenarios won't be possible from the get-go (TotH's cosmopolitanism doesn't quite stretch to Japanese, French, Italian and Polish units) however with the vast majority of the 1943-45 British, US, Soviet and German OOB modelled, and map and scenario editors available, it's hard to imagine skirmish variety becoming an issue.

Peter can expect some scathe from reviewers fond of random maps, simple turn structures, fancy campaign layers, and urban warfare (There will be no multi-storey buildings in the initial release). Whether these criticisms come to dominate post-release forum discourse, will depend heavily on TotH's knack for delivering unscripted tactical conundrums and credible combat dramas. If the game tests and tale tells as masterfully as its inspirations then we're in for a treat.

Last week's rung-whittling ladderwrites were Matchstick, Shiloh, Rorschach617, protorp, Iglethal and AFKAMC. Minutes after the last word had been slotted into place Roman was using the repaired ladder to retrieve medicine balls and model Horsas from the office roof.

For a spell in the late Seventies legendary defoxer Knud 'The Link' Linklater went totally organic. Instead of getting his collages from the puzzle pages of newspapers and magazines, he'd wander the streets of his hometown scouring shop windows, dumpsters, and storm drains for 'accidental' foxers. Roman remembers him talking, with tears in his eyes, about the day he spotted a beautiful eight-clue 'Cuban Missile Crisis' foxer on the parcel shelf of a parked car, then an hour or so later a perfect nine-component 'Wildlife of the Kalahari' puzzle in a pub urinal.

Our collectible train buying service starts when you reach out to us via email, phone or via our Get a Quote web form. Once we have made contact, based on your unique situation and requirements, we help you decide how to sell your trains.

Getting a Cash Offer for your Model Trains typically involves us valuing your collection based on an inventory list and making you an offer to purchase your collection at a fixed price. There are a variety of reasons that you might prefer to get a Cash Offer.

Inventory the Collection: The preferred way to get a quote is to provide Trainz with an inventory list of your trains. We provide an Inventory List Excel template in Excel or PDF format that shows the information we need to accurately value the collection (primarily Quantity, Manufacturer and Model Number), but we also accept (but do not encourage) hand-written lists. If you need to submit a handwritten list, please use our print friendly version. Typically, you will email us the filled in Excel spreadsheet (the best option), or scan and email or fax your list to Trainz. In situations such as an Estate Sale or when it is not feasible for you to provide a list, for very large collections of 500 items or more (excluding track) Trainz can sometimes arrange to inventory the collection on your behalf.

Prepare the Contract: If you accept the offer, Trainz will write a contract for the purchase, which lists the offer amount and describes the terms of the purchase, including the payment schedule, whether the deal is to be shipped, dropped off or picked up, and any other special conditions. We will typically send a draft Purchase Agreement ahead of time, so you have time to review it. Sometimes the contract will be signed ahead of time, and sometimes it will be signed at pick-up.

Ship or Pick-Up the Collection: If the collection is to be shipped, we will send FedEx labels to you so that you can ship the items to Trainz headquarters. If Trainz has agreed to pick up the collection, we will place you on our pick-up schedule when our pick-up team will be in your area.

Make Payment: At the time if pick-up, we make full payment or a partial payment, depending on the payment terms we agree to. In the case of small deals that were mailed in, we typically send out the check once we have inventoried the collection.

When you use our Model Trains Consignment Service, we agree to sell your collection on a combination of Trainz.com, eBay or other marketplaces depending on what will earn you the most for your trains. Unlike getting a Cash Offer to purchase your trains, when you sell your trains under a Consignment Agreement we agree to pay you a fixed percentage of every sale. There are a variety of reasons that you might prefer to sell your trains via a Consignment Agreement.

Qualify the Consignment: The first thing we do is to determine if your collection is a good candidate for us to sell using our Model Trains Consignment Service. Some sellers choose to pursue a Cash Offer (by submitting an inventory list) before they decide to use our Consignment Service.

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