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Weardale and Teesdale Scenarios

Several thousand scenarios have been developed for Train Simulator by its enthusiastic user base and made available for free through Steam via the application or website. Those listed here have been chosen because they work with the edition of Train Simulator that is free to members of the Friends without any additional downloads. Specifically they use the Weardale and Teesdale Network in the '60s route and nothing else. That is the only criteria for inclusion here the aim of this page being to help users continue enjoying this route as it stands. There is no judgment on quality, though a couple of scenarios that are actually broken have been omitted and potential problems are noted, and they are listed by motive power then in whatever order I happened to come across them.

Adding a scenario is simple enough. If you have Train Simulator, at least if you got it through the Friends' offer, you will have an account with Steam which you can access in your web browser. Find a scenario in the Workshop, click the Subscribe button and next time you start Train Simulator the scenario(s) you have chosen will be downloaded and available to drive. All of these links will open in a new tab (or browser window depending on which browser you use) for the Steam website and the page for the scenario. If you are not already logged in the link to do so will be at the top right then you can subscribe. If you leave that tab/window open, come back to this page and click on another scenario it too will open a new tab or window but you will still be logged in and can just click on subscribe. Subscribing to scenarios and other Workshop items from within the Steam application is just as simple, open the Workshop tab and take your pick, but then you can't use these links. Bear in mind that, for reasons described below, I would not recommend subscribing to many at a time.

Some of these scenarios are better than others but all have been created by Train Simulator users in their own time and made available for free just because they wish to share their enthusiasm. If you enjoy a scenario take a minute or two to thank its author. It is always good to know that your efforts are appreciated and you may encourage them to create more. If you find (or created) a scenario that should be included here please let me know about it by sending a link to trainsimulator@friendsofdrcm.org.

There are hundreds of other scenarios available just for this route which have additional dependencies. Most of those are rolling stock of course (and if you have just bought a locomotive, be it a tank engine or a Deltic, why would you not want to try it on the route?) but one DLC in particular crops up time and time again- The European and UK Loco's and Assets Pack. This was included as standard with several earlier versions of Train Simulator, as was its US equivalent, so it is only natural that people who have been developing scenarios for a while would make regular use of it. My understanding is that the pack is quite old and Dovetail now regards it as below par but that is cold comfort to new users. Adding it to your collection would greatly increase the number of Workshop scenarios available to you so if you decide you want it be aware that, although it can be bought separately, it is included in several older DLCs. My recommendation would be WCML North which covers some of the Glasgow area lines and the WCML to Carlisle. It includes both the Euro/UK and US packs for some reason, is well worth having on its own merits and frequently discounted to a price below the cost of either pack bought separately.

On the subject of dependencies there is nothing to prevent you from subscribing to a scenario whether or not you own the needed DLC (which is just as well considering the next paragraph) and there is a way to get around their absence. If you start a scenario without one or more dependencies available the first thing that will appear is a window telling you that something is missing and offering the options of editing or exiting. You can select either of course but the third option is to press F2 which is the save position function. Cancel (or save- it makes no difference but what would you be saving?) and you are returned to the scenario without that edit/exit window in the way free to carry on. This does not give you carte-blanche to run any and every scenario you fancy. Obviously if the scenario involves driving a locomotive you don't have you won't be going anywhere. More subtly completing a scenario may depend on you assembling a train from wagons you don't have or the train in front of you may need a loco' that isn't there so it will never get out of your way.

A related issue (it's not really much of a problem) is "phantom dependencies"- that is DLC which are listed by Steam as a requirement for a scenario but actually have nothing to do with it. Of course, as has been noted, you can still subscribe anyway but this could cause you to overlook a scenario that you can use. It is not clear whether this is a Steam or TS problem but listing such a scenario in the Drive/Workshop tab will show these phantom dependencies as a requirement and, as is the case when you genuinely lack dependencies, you will not be able to start the scenario from there. Quite why you would want to start scenarios from the Workshop tab, which has its uses but just lumps every scenario you have together into one long unordered list, is unclear and the scenarios will still start from the Career, Standard or Free Roam tab as appropriate.

It is worth noting that installing a scenario can go wrong. In some cases it can go very wrong. The Middleton to Sunderland run is a Career scenario and worked as such on the Friends' laptop but, for some reason, it was listed on my machine as a Free Roam for the Class 37 with no title. Single Line Coal and Middleton Shunter were both identified as Free Roam scenarios for the Class 25. Deleting and resubscribing has sorted things out for all of these and did not take long. There was nothing wrong with the scenarios themselves but the process of installing them did not work properly the first time. A far greater problem was encountered on the Friends laptop which simply stopped running TS altogether for a while. The problem was a scenario that become corrupted when it was downloaded and unsubscribing did no good because TS would crash before it got to the point where it registered the change. In that instance the scenario file itself had to be traced and deleted and, once that was done, all was well. For this reason I would suggest not subscribing to several scenarios at once- if one went on to give problems you would not know which it was.

This problem does not speak very highly for the way in which TS handles errors- one can understand the program having problems when it tries to execute a corrupted scenario file but to crash on start-up because of one is just odd. Dovetail Games' customer support did not come out of this incident well either insisting that the Friends' laptop was incapable of running TS in spite of the fact that it had been doing so for the best part of a year (I am assured that their support procedures have improved since). Instead the solution came through the Discussion section of Steam, accessible either through the program or the website, within a few hours of me posting my enquiry. There is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable community of players there which is a great asset to TS, Dovetail and Steam.

One odd thing about a few of these scenarios is that they start before TS has finished setting up the scenery. I do not know why but it is consistent- the scenarios that do this do it every time and on each of the PCs that I have tried them on. You can still drive the trains in these featureless landscapes and the scenery will start to appear around you almost immediately but it does spoil the effect.