Cambridge Lines & ECML route - Introduction

Welcome to Cambridge lines & ECML route for Train Simulator / Railworks.  This route is set at the end of the steam era and the beginning of the diesels. It covers the ECML from Kings Cross up to York, and the Cambridge main line from the junction with the ECML at Hitchin through Cambridge up to Ely. It also has the freight-only line between St Ives and Ely; the passenger line from Huntingdon East via St Ives to Cambridge and the route out to Newmarket. With v5.5 it also covers two work-in-progress sections:

·         the line between Peterborough East and Ely 

·         the line from Cambridge to Mildenhall.

At present about 350+ route miles - with a mixture of main line, some classic branch line and some industrial mileage. 1,694 track miles.

The line covers 100+ stations - ranging from the tiny branch halts through the 1.5 miles of Cambridge station to the congested environs of Kings Cross, Peterborough, York and Top Shed. 

The traffic across the region’s lines is very varied – fast passenger trains like the Kings Cross “Queen of Scots”, “Flying Scotsman” and the Cambridge “Beer train” and the old Great Eastern "Fenman" route up from Liverpool street; endless coal trains between Doncaster and the great marshalling yards at Ferme Park, Temple Mills and Whitemoor; food shipments (especially fruit) from the fertile farms of the fens - and local stoppers and pick-up goods making their stately way across the fens.  

This release is the fifth stage of this project - it further extends the original Cambridgeshire lines route with more from a heavily modified version of the ECML-S route from RSC leading up and into the excellent East Coast – British Rail (Peterborough to York) from Creative Rail. 

Feedback is gratefully received - this is a long-term project aimed at providing a realistic, stimulating and accurate recreation of this fascinating area and era. 

This is a huge, high-detail route and it requires a powerful machine to run it well. In its current form loading takes about 3 minutes on my machine but runs smoothly in-game. Despite the many improvements of 64-bit there is still some stutter when moving into intensive areas such as Kings Cross or Cambridge station. 

The route uses the track from the ECML-S route (this gives a much better ‘feel’ compared to the default Kuju track that I originally used). This means that the track WILL NOT LOAD unless you have the ECML-S. The IOW route and Euro-Asset pack are also important as they supply approx. 25% of the scenic items. Of course, when I started, the ‘Euro-assets’ were included in the base game and the IOW route was either free or minimum cost (it’s so long ago that I can’t remember !).

The route is half ‘original’ work and half cloned from the ECML-S and the East Coast routes and then extensively remodelled. Many of the custom assets are either clones from existing items (mostly Kuju, RSC, DTG) or reference textures from them etc. Obviously I do not own the textures or underlying geometry of the ECML-S or East Coast bits and the route owes a massive debt to the superior skills of the many people who created the assets that I have used or re-purposed. The rule of thumb is … if it looks a bit crap close up then I probably did it – if it looks good then someone else did it and I don’t own it or claim any rights over it.

The route is set in the 1950s but in order to provide for the widest time-span while retaining interesting period pieces I have been flexible – so the ECML has the expansion to 4 tracks and Potters Bar rebuild from 58/59 but I’ve retained the St Ives to Ely line that was half-abandoned by this time and Kings Cross has the surrounds of the early 1950s (pre diesel).