WESTBOUND PIG TRAIN
END-TO-END ROAD FREIGHT ACTIVITY FOR MSTS MARIAS PASS
WB Pig Train is an end-to-end activity for those who like a long road freight run with lots of AI traffic. The easy jobs that all the crews want are the yard switchers or local jobs, with regular times and routines (kinda like most of the canned MSTS activities). However, the crews I admire are the ones who may be called at any hour of the day or night, no matter the weather or other plans, to hop on a road freight and move the cars from one end of the crew district to another. Full-length Marias Pass activities simulating the job of the road freight crew are what I missed most with MSTS out of the box. So...
I have been working on road freight activities. The .apk file WB Pig Train is my latest. You are the engineer called for the BNSF's hottest train over Marias Pass. There are no pick-ups or set-outs, because a hot pig train has only one mission on this stretch of track...get from one end to the other, so the pigs that were loaded in Minneapolis are that much closer to Seattle! Your job is to move them as quickly as possible consistent with safety, speed limits and the opposing traffic.
To set the scene even more, it's a rainy chilly fall morning as you meet your conductor in Shelby and prepare to take the helm of the 3 Dash 9's in charge of the pigs today. There's a full complement of eastbounds, including a late running Amtrak, to make your task a little trickier.
Your first step after unzipping is to unpack the .apk file by double-clicking or dragging it onto the TSUnpack icon in the Train Sim Utils folder (making sure you've corrected the install bug in the application path line--search the Train Sim forums for more info). There will be few or no file overwrites, as I've tried to make sure every consist is a new one and every car and engine is a stock MSTS-supplied piece of rolling stock. One word of WARNING...you need to have the coupler break issue fixed (either by editing the break values in the Dash 9 and pig car .eng and .wag files or by modifying the route), since the path takes you over the north track at Cutbank and MP 1152.2.
Read the activity description on the Drive a Train screen, and check your briefing when you start the activity. Watch the yard speed limits, use the train brakes sparingly, and notch down when taking diverging routes, or you will have some durability issues on your evaluation. A full run should take about four hours, so you might want to divide it up over several days with activity saves.
Here comes your train...now let's move those pigs!
Activity created by flarrfan, kentlw@yahoo.com for questions or comments.