The Cajon Pass is located not far from Los Angeles, California, but far enough to be a whole different world terrain-wise, with high mountains and parched deserts...and lots of rail traveling through. Both the BNSF and UP have rail through the Cajon Pass itself, and 3DTrainStuff has including both routes, as well as a BNSF route from Barstow to Mojave that connects with UP at the northern end of the scenery package. To be specific, the three interconnecting routes provided are:
Given that MSTS itself only included 600 miles of track, and only a portion of that really intended for freight operation, the 259 miles included in the Cajon Pass package gives the freight railroading fan a lot of additional area to operate on.
The package is quite complete too, in that it's not just a bare route. It also includes an extensive set of appropriate locomotives and rolling stock. BNSF and Union Pacific locos are including of course, but so are older equipment that would have run these tracks in years past including equipment from Southern Pacific and Santa Fe as well as GP-9's from Cargill. Appropriate freight cars are included too and it should also be mentioned that passenger train operations are not forgotten either, as the Santa Fe's "Super Chief" consist is included too.
One thing not to be missed is the route manual. I mention this specifically because it could be easily missed, as it's a .doc file that is installed with the rest of the route in the train-sim route folder. The manual covers a great deal of route history, details of how things work, special signal indications and much more and is well worth reading.
When I look at any form of entertainment I like to look at value for my dollar--basically how many hours of use I get from something versus what it costs. These days a 90 minute movie can cost $10 (and more if you want snacks). You can run the Cajon Pass trains endlessly in explore mode of course but you don't have to, as over 30 activities are included plus 3DTrainStuff has posted additional ones on their web site for download. Running through every activity will keep you busy for a very long time. The variety of activities is nice too, including anything from a short 20 minutes of switching to a full route freight drag that will take you several hours. Value-wise, the Cajon Pass seems to me to be a pretty good deal!
There is so much stuff included that I was only able to try a small portion. What I tried I was quite pleased with. All the locomotives are of good quality--they operate as I would expect them to and visually they compare in detail to any others I've seen. You get complete locomotives here too, with cabviews and sound specific to each one. Throughout the review I've included many screen shots that in total cover most of the equipment and major scenic locations of the add-on. I think by viewing them you'll get a pretty good idea for yourself the quality of the work here. Don't forget also that to get a larger view of any image just click on it and you'll load the original full size screen shot.
I tried several of the activities and the ones I tried all worked just fine. Reading in the forums, though, there are apparently some activities that have bugs in them and 3DTrainStuff is working to fix them. Since the add-on was original released several patches have been made available. It's nice to see a publisher that works to improve things when flaws are found.
I did run into a couple of problems. There was a spot where I got one of those phantom derailments, such as found on the default Marias Pass route. I finally decided it was time to install when of the general purpose fixes for this sort of thing and after I did that I had no additional problems. If you do still have this sort of problem be sure and check our FAQ for help.
There's also a problem with the Barstow hump yard under some circumstances. As you can see in the screen shot above, the underlying terrain simply is not there...the tracks just float in space. This does not happen always and is apparently something that the designers are aware of but cannot fix because of the way the sim itself works. The manual provides a workaround that simply requires doing a save and a reload. When it loads right seeing a full size hump yard is quite an impressive site--lots of complex track and an assortment of buildings covering a huge area.
Otherwise, the scenery is quite spectacular. Looking up at the mountains while going through the pass itself is quite a sight. At other times you'll pass through great expanses of flat desert with nothing but scrubby little plants alongside. The various yards are all quite impressive in their size and detail. It's also nice to see that towns along the route are included in some sense of reality, with large numbers of houses extending quite some distance from the track. The impression of reality is quite good.
There is of course a drawback to this level of detail, and that is in frame rates. I found that in general the Cajon Pass offered frame rates lower than what I'm used to on other simpler routes. I run an 800 MHz Pentium III and frame rates did at times dip below 10 fps. If you have a slower computer that is already poor when running default scenery this could be an issue but if you are generally satisfied with your results on default routes the slowdown here should not be overly objectionable.
In conclusion, I'm still quite excited about this route even after many hours of using it. I've even branched out beyond the included equipment; as you can see in some of the screen shots I've been running the UP "Big Boy" steam locomotive on some of the UP trackage. Since the Big Boy has many fans, judging by the download count, here's a great place for all those people to run it.
3DTrainStuff has done some very nice add-ons in the past and the Cajon Pass package certainly continues in that tradition and in fact improves on it, by offering a complete package of routes, equipment and activities that will keep the train-sim fan busy for many hours.
Nels Anderson
nels@train-sim.com
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Nels Anderson.
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