I probably mentioned in my last review that running North American style
freight trains is my favorite thing to do in train-simming. There have been
some nice freight routes produced, but not much for my part of the country --
the U.S. northeast. We may not have the Rocky Mountains, but we do have some
interesting and challenging terrain (hey, the "Berkshire" type steam locomotive
is named after mountains here in Massachusetts...you don't see any locomotive
named "The Rockies" now do you...)One well known railfan location is Sandpatch, a challenging pass through the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania. This is some east coast railroading at it's best! Historically, several railroads traveled this area: Western Maryland, Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) and Baltimore and Ohio (B&O). Through mergers, Chessie System and ultimately CSX trains ran and still run through the area.
Maple Leaf Tracks has chosen Sandpatch as their first contribution to east coast America railroading. The area covered is some 50 miles of mainline from Cumberland, Maryland in the south to Rockwood, Pennsylvania in the north. Along this route the elevation changes by some 1800 feet, providing some hard work for those big freight locomotives. The main line has yards at both ends, passing tracks along the way plus some short spurs with mines and industry to investigate.
The add-on is set in the time period of the mid-1980's, which allows for an interesting mix of equipment. At that time you might see Chessie System, C&O, B&O and Western Maryland equipment -- perhaps all on the same train. All this equipment is included, as there are 16 locomotives and 14 pieces of rolling stock in the package.
Fifty miles of track may not sound like much, but remember that this is freight territory and those heavy loads go slow. Straight, non-stop travel from end to end takes around two hours, and should you need to stop for other traffic, to do some switching, or to pick up helper locomotives the run can be substantially longer.
Of course, there's more to do than just run back and forth. A nice collection of activities are included. Some are easy runs along the mainline (with the addition of other trains being present, which makes these runs more interesting that simply using the explore route mode). Others are more challenging and may involve switching, helper activity and may even be multiple part activities. I only had time to try a sampling of the available activities but those are tried were enjoyable and appropriate for the route.
Much of the route is woods and mountains. The designers must have spent a great deal of time placing individual trees as these are seen everywhere! Doing it this way, though, is a bit of a mixed bag. From some angles it's kind of obvious that you are seeing rows and rows of the same tree. You will also sometimes see obviously artificial rows with gaps between them; this is especially noticeable in autumn when the trees are brightly colored and the background textures are green. From some angles, though, the multitude of trees look quite good.
I do like the towns and other various man-made structures along the route. The bridges looks just right, very "railroady" and the towns have enough breadth and depth to them to look real, and they are not all cookie cutter buildings either, the buildings (especially those closest to the tracks) are obviously custom jobs. Very nice. You can see a lot of this in the screen shots. Actually, the screen shots tell the story better than words do!
Though there are a number of different locomotives included, the designers economized a bit by providing only one cabview. This isn't all that unreasonably, though, considering that EMD locomotives of that era would all have looked pretty similiar from the driver's seat. The cab is a realistic original design, with the only flaw being the quality of the photoreal bitmap portion which is grainier than other cabs I've seen. The cab is quite usable and provide reasonable views both inside and outside.
The locomotive exteriors and all quite nice and represent the desired look of the era well. The Chessie System paint scheme is one of the nicer ones, historically, in my view--it's almost a shame that CSX didn't stick with it. You'll be driving some nice looking locomotives along the route, no doubt about it.
Another special feature of the route is authentic B&O-style CPL signalling. It's nice to see details like this included as proper knowledge of the real signalling system goes a long way towards enhancing the realism of running the route. Since the signals are somewhat different from those found elsewhere it's fortunate that the designers included a detailed description of them in the included docs.
Speaking of docs--what you get comes on the CD with the rest of the software. It prints out OK and that's what I did as it makes a useful reference. When running I like to have a route specification with mileposts and special locations so I know where I am and what I'm coming up on. Maple Leaf Tracks supplies just such a specification in the docs. Also included is a grade profile, which is somewhat helpful in helping you plan your power and braking needs, though it's not detailed enough to show all the little bumps in the route. One annoyance is that the route spec and the grade profile don't really match up. One uses mile posts (starting somewhere far off the including route, so the lowest one is 178.9 miles) and the other uses miles only along the route (thus starting at 0). Worse, the each have named locations marked, but not the same ones so cross-referencing this way is not fully possible. These charts are a good idea and necessary, but were not completely thought out so they are not as useful as they could be.
Another little annoyance was the automatic fault detector. Actually this sort of feature is a great idea...when it's done right. Here, the announcement is made via a pop-up box that causes the sim to pause--not so good. A better choice would have been an audible announcement as some other routes have done recently. Not really a big deal though.
One fortunate aspect of this route is that the railroads involved have a long history and are quite popular with train-simmers, so you are not stuck in just the original mid-1980's time period. If you recall my mention of the Berkshire steam locomotive at the start of this review there was another reason for that, that being that as you can see in some of the screen shots a nice freeware C&O Berkshire is available in our file library here and of course there are lots of suitable freight cars to match that era of railroading too.
In additional, Maple Leaf Products has their own expansion pack, the B&O Heritage Pack that allows you to run typical 1960's Baltimore and Ohio equipment. There are even additional Sandpatch activities included to use this equipment.
Overall I've certainly enjoyed my time as an engineer on Sandpatch. As you can see in the screen shots I've run the route in all seasons, in a variety of weather and with various equipment. Problems were minimal, installation was easy...there's really little to complain about. If you're into freight railroading, running Sandpatch should make you a happy engineer.
Nels Anderson
nels@train-sim.com
Copyright © 2002 by
Nels Anderson.
All Rights Reserved.