Swingin' Around

One of the main highlights of Tennessee Pass was the manned helper operations out of Minturn, and in this scenario set you will be the crew of one of these sets, assisting heavy coal train CVCPA-14 up the grade and returning to Minturn.

Manned helpers are easily one of the most interesting operations in all of railroading, and I've done my best working with game restrictions to model them as realistically as possible. Thus, both scenarios are fully designed to be played in cab, and have a very large amount of communictaion between both the conductor (switching) and headend (throttling up, down, etc.). This can get very grating very quickly if you play in 3rd person or at the front where you don't need to know any of the information given to you. The only exception to this is the stop at Pando, where you'll need to see where the front of your train is.

Obviously, the game didn't take too well to a lot of the work I did, so there are a few compromises:
- You don't actually just have control of the helpers, you control the entire train.
- Pando is weird, since IRL the helpers would coast through the siding (flatspot) but since you drive all 9 engines you will need to provide power and apply the brakes.
- Cutting off the train at Tennessee Pass had to be almost completly cut, since the AI could not deal with you sharing the same signal block and wouldn't move (AI still does some, uhh, weird things, just don't look too hard).

Part One is listed in game as [SA 01] Swingin' Up... and takes 120 minutes, medium/hard.
Part Two is listed in game as [SA 02] ...Swingin Down and takes 80 minutes, very easy.

As usual, payware requirments are linked below, all other requirements are freeware and linked in the readme.

Created by Mfeets

Tags: ac4400cw coal helpers southern-pacific tennessee-pass union-pacific