Hello –
For those who got into during the Easter Special promotion: congratulations.
In the meantime, we have been busy. We have upgraded CTC to expand the support of switches. which now can be placed in all different ways (TDP allowed only 4 variants), and added the support of slip switches, both single and double slip switches. These slip switches operate like most in reality, having two switch motors (there is a TDP clone out there that support slip switches with just one motor, they do exist in reality also, but are very rare). TDP never supported slip switches.
The latest addition to CTC is the support of what we call “superblocks”. They represent stretches of consecutive smaller blocks, where each of them have their own attribute, like speed limits, but which can be occupied by only one train. We have noticed some TDP territories where there is a stretch of track as a combination of several blocks. Since TDP places automatic signals between those sections, you can send a train into that stretch even though the previous train hasn’t left the last section yet. You usually find a hint saying please don’t do this, but nothing is really stopping you. In CTC you can define such sequence of blocks as a collection for a superblock. The occupancy status shows the status for the whole stretch, and you can begin or terminate a route only on the while thing, while the train will still run through the individual blocks as usual. You can also have several platforms located in whole stretch.
Finally – Toledo Terminal is back. We have done some research, and found that must of the crossings in the TDP version are shown as overpasses, when in fact there area really diamonds. Don’t blame the author of original the territory for it – diamonds were not supported by TDP at that time. We converted all crossing to diamonds (except one, which appears to have been really an overpass). This variant is available in the FULL version. The FREE and STD version still have the overpasses – and less trains in the schedule.
As always, enjoy the game.
The WebRailRoader Team