Good idea to include the numeric form of the wheel arrangements, I've updated the description with them.

For the top speed, I like it at 115 mph. It allows taking advantage of the 112 mph speed of many of the coach mods of the same time, and gives the E6s a niche once more powerful engines (like the K4s) are available. In practice it won't happen often, power is the limiting factor. On my test save, even with a 2 car train it takes an uninterrupted run from one end of the map to the other to reach the top speed. My trains using the E6s with a more reasonable consist of 5-6 cars usually reach more like 90 mph at most during their runs. The top speed shouldn't have too much impact on cost calculations as that's mostly driven by the power number for locomotives.

If it really bothers you it's a one number change in the .mdl and you can change it to whatever you like there.

You could also look up the vehicle tweaker mod by wernerk. Useful for sorting out mismatches between various modders like max speed vs regular service speed, real weight vs vanilla vehicle weight. It also doesn't get overridden if the modders updates their mod.

Originally posted by Labby:

For the top speed, I like it at 115 mph. It allows taking advantage of the 112 mph speed of many of the coach mods of the same time, and gives the E6s a niche once more powerful engines (like the K4s) are available. In practice it won't happen often, power is the limiting factor. On my test save, even with a 2 car train it takes an uninterrupted run from one end of the map to the other to reach the top speed. My trains using the E6s with a more reasonable consist of 5-6 cars usually reach more like 90 mph at most during their runs. The top speed shouldn't have too much impact on cost calculations as that's mostly driven by the power number for locomotives.

Hi @Labby , fair enough. And I hope it's understood I'm not being critical of your work, it's a great mod and I'm just trying to see how it fits into the game in a balanced way. I realize tho that many people don't actually play the game by its income rules and just run sandbox railroads anyhow.

Also to be clear, income paid at delivery is directly linked to a vehicle's stated top speed limit. The actual speed achieved on the map is irrelevant (it only affects line throughput/efficiency). So vehicles with elevated top speed specs are instantly paid greater income, regardless of their actual performance on the map.

So this one will "out-pay" every single vanilla and mod steam loco I have (including Hudsons etc, which already have balance challenges), and it nearly beats every single diesel/electric, often for less cost. When I saw that, that's why I wanted to ask what your thoughts were when deciding to give it the unconfirmed one-off record speed, that's all.

Originally posted by Clockwise Haggis:

You could also look up the vehicle tweaker mod by wernerk. Useful for sorting out mismatches between various modders like max speed vs regular service speed, real weight vs vanilla vehicle weight. It also doesn't get overridden if the modders updates their mod.

Hi @Clockwise Haggis , thanks for this, that's very handy! I'll check it out.

Also in this case I can still use one of the K1 mods out there for my dose of later 4-4-2 Atlantics, they spec about 80-90 mph.


Thanks again both, cheers!

Got it, it's been a while since I've played with money on. It's a slog until you get a few profitable routes up and then money stops mattering anyway. After playing hard or very hard a few times, now I just do easy or sandbox and skip to the fun part.

I'll probably end up there myself soon too haha! I still grind VH level, from 1800 starts and date speed dialled back to 1/4x or less lol... Actually it wasn't until I started doing VH a while ago that I become more sensitive to the relative balance of various mods, prior to that I was just throwing anything together because none of it mattered!

Current playthru is I think my first fully fleshed out set of reasonably balanced steam-era offerings and I'm curious to see how badly it tanks haha. After that I'll probably just go back to sandbox eye candy, because my PC probably can't run a profitable enough map size in the modern era anyway.

Oh hey I forgot to ask, I notice these locos don't release steam around the pistons, is that intentional?

Yeah, that was intentional. It would be correct for some steam should blow out of the cylinder drain ♥♥♥♥♥ when starting, but once moving exhaust steam is blown out the stack. Steam coming from the cylinders at speed would indicate worn out cylinder or valve packing. I don't know of a way to turn an emitter on or off relative to speed (or condition), so I opted to remove the cylinder effects since in game things are moving more often than not.

Interesting! I've never seen the real deal but always thought some minor steam leakage at the cylinders was normal, especially up at operating pressure, and that the stack was mainly the firebox exhaust. I thought cylinder leakage was the main reason water needed to be replenished.

It's funny, some mod locos have a custom camera view set up at wheel/rail level (at least with the Advanced Cam View mod) but I usually can't see jack from there thru all the cylinder steam lol. Looks great passing by but not so much onboard haha.

In normal operation the exhaust steam goes through the blast pipe in the smoke box to induce a draft to pull hot gasses from the firebox into the boiler tubes, and fresh air into the firebox through the grate. The two exceptions to this that I can think of are compound locomotives where the exhaust steam from the high pressure cylinders goes to the low pressure cylinders before going out the stack, and on locomotives with condensers which do recycle exhaust steam back to feedwater, but are pretty rare. I don't know of any American examples, but they were used in places with little water available, or when minimizing exhaust was required.

Cool. It's been a while since I read up on it, so it morphed in my head into boiler steam being recycled (ie condenser) and only combustion by-product steam going out the stack. Obviously not the case.

I guess as cylinder sealing improved over time, the percentage of cylinder/valve leakage steam probably declined. Though as locos got larger, the actual volume of leakage steam might have appeared similar even if the percent was dropping.

I'm curious now to check some other locos (vanilla and mods) to see how much cylinder steam leakage other modders included. It's interesting that I never really noticed it "missing" until this mod, and I have no idea even why I noticed it. I think this model renders lighter than than others (which I really like) which are just solid black blobs and can't see any detail, so maybe that's how I noticed there was no steam from the cylinders.

...So I went down the rabbit hole of steam tech again lol (I was overdue for a refresher). Yes I forgot about the blast pipe! 🤦‍♂️

So now I'm beginning to wonder if the game modelling is actually misleading, which sounds like what you're thinking too. If the cylinder emitters can't be toggled or throttled, then it shows cylinder/valve steam leakage at all speeds.

Every vanilla and modded loco I checked in Workshop screenshots shows this, so they all look like worn leaks. Going to check some in game to see if anyone appears to have figured out how to throttle that emitter. Moar rabbit hole lolz!