Tim,

Difficult, the major ones are worth waiting for (will be getting
Exeter this Christmas), but I do like to get somthing every year for
Christmas to get my teeth into, so it needs to be silver +. There are
many of ther older sims which perhaps can be upgraded to take account
for correct placement of goods shunting, double heading, Saturday
timetables, football specials etc.?

I often buy secondhand railway books of the area covered by the sims
I
have, and it never ceases to amaze me how accurate they are.

The sim I have been waiting for is something on the old Great
Central, with so many books around on it and the actual preserved
line itself, and many interested parties, could someone help out on
funding/research, Woodford Halse 1957 Silver, Nottingham Victoria
1957 Gold etc would be the icing on the cake, as the locations do not
exist anymore, like Bath 1961.

I will be happy as long as something of interest comes out every
year, please do not retire yet I will want some sims to do when I
retire !



Regards,



Nigel



--- In SIAMulations@..., "Tim Bourne" <yahoogroups@...>
wrote:
>
> It's clear that a project the size of Exeter 1955 is close to, or
> perhaps beyond, the limit of what can be done by one person in a
> reasonable time. The point of this message, then, is to float some
> ideas about what could be done in the reasonably near future.
>
> I do have another major project in mind, NOT set in the West
Country,
> and have started research, but realistically that's unlikely to see
> the light of day before December 2008 at the earliest, and I'd
really
> rather not keep you all waiting so long before offering something
new.
> Some of the others are also working on something new, but they all
> have jobs that consume a lot of their time.
>
> A lot more information has become available since the original
> Penzance 1955 was produced, and a lot more features have been added
to
> our simulations. It would now be possible to produce a "Silver"
> Penzance 1957 with three screens, and this would also be the testbed
> for enhanced handling of shunting, with multi-portion arrivals and
> departures, and tracking of all the parts of a departure.
>
> Though the track layouts in the West Country changed very little in
> the sixties, the traffic changed a great deal, particularly with the
> rush to dieselisation. I wonder how much interest there would be in
> versions of Exeter and Penzance set somewhere in the 1962-65 period,
> and perhaps also in 1970. Some work has already been done on an
Oxford
> 1972, but I'm not sure if there would be a demand for it.
>
> Your comments and suggestions are welcome, but please bear in mind
that:
>
> 1 With each new version of Windows we have to wait to see whether
> Microsoft have killed us. It looked possible that they had done it
> with Vista, but in fact all was well.
>
> 2 I don't particularly want to retire completely, but it would be
nice
> to avoid the pressure of having to get something finished by a date.
>
> 3 Being realistic, we probably don't have the resources to produce
> more than one major simulation every two years or so, plus smaller
> ones or variations as discussed above, and anything that Brian,
Phill
> and others may add.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tim.
>