Toonces wrote:I can't argue with your logic, but I am having trouble envisioning scenarios along such a route that would be fun to play. Pulling a long heavy coal train for a few hundred miles with no stops or any other activity sounds kind of dull. That's part of the problem with some of the Donner scenarios - lots of pretty scenery, but the scenarios are kind of dull. Or at least they were until I found out about using EnableAsyncKeys and Control-Shift-5 to speed the thing up.
You should read up on operations there, as there's more to the hill than trains going from Cheyenne to Laramie (and beyond). For starters, you have switching in both yards (Laramie switches locals, while Cheyenne has some classification duties), and there's one industry between those towns that sees a couple of daily trains.
For locals, Cheyenne has Frontier Oil to the east and Dyno Nobel Chemical a few miles to the west. Within the yard you have Nortrak, Orrison Distributors, Capital Lumber, Cook-McCain gravel, Agridyne, Hills Bros Chemical, Musket Corp, Wyoming Liquor Commission, Chief Oil, Puma Steel, plus a handful of BNSF-served industries along the Reed Street corridor and one more UP-served location adjacent to BNSF's Cheyenne track. In Laramie you have Mountain Cement, Big Horn Lumber, Entegra Gas, as well as UP's rail facility. Finally, there's the BNSF interchange and a dozen or so miles west of Cheyenne you have the Martin Merietta gravel quarry, which supplies ballast on much of UP and BNSF mainline in the area (1 or 2 dedicated unit trains daily).
So you see, there's quite a bit more going on than long trains grinding up and down the hill, which BTW number between 40 and 60 in a 24hr period.
