At the risk of being a party pooper I just wanna remind you that unlike the airlines, the majority of TOCs in the UK aren't allowed to own their stock but have to lease it from ROSCOs. This is one of the many crazy conditions of the franchising agreements.

Well, in this game you would lease trains until you can afford to lease better trains.

Then your franchise will run out and you'll have wasted money on the research and development of said trains. :p

Fairy Nuff, it's your game so I guess you can call the shots ;)

It's not really, I would never find the time to ever create it. Besides I can't take credit for the idea either.

Although I was being somewhat sarcastic it would still make sense to be able to "research" better stock to lease as an alternative to "owning" stock as in the Flight Sim version. Ie. you'd start off leasing 142's and 158's or whatever your period, and then be able to research HST's or Pendo's etc.

I suppose the way I would do it is by creating more than one, infact many "games" - each game having the UK (or other countries) devided up into franchises (or BR regions depending when the year was set for that game?) then each player is assigned a franchise to begin with. Then they build their franchises with stock, earning money and running good services, and after so much time the franchises are "renewed" and the better players can now run the more lucrative routes, or something.

I guess this'd require a full map of the UK. I think this is beyond train sims at the moment.

Maybe MSTS2 can provide, that promises some weird way of creating "any route" using Google Earth or whatever MS's version of that is.

Hello and welcome to the Forum Stan