TRAIN SIM WORLD 4 and the unique fascination of simulators
Have you ever sat down and actually considered how a train moves itself forward? Matt Peddlesden has. As executive producer on Dovetail’s Train Sim World 4, he’s thought about it more than most people. As he tells me about the inner workings of locomotives at Dovetail’s HQ in Kent, one thing becomes clear: if this wasn’t his job, he’d still be satisfying his passion and curiosity for trains.
That’s not a constant across the game industry. Not everyone you talk to is truly passionate about loot rarity, or brutal melee takedown animations, or seasonal skins. But over here in the world of simulators, they march to the beat of a slightly different drum. There’s an inherent passion here. You get the sense that many developers in this space are working simply because they want to see a certain thing made and then play it, and there’s a high amount of crossover between content creators and developers as a result.
It’s still gaming, more or less, but the rules are different. There’s an ultimate realism to strive for, and performing even mundane actions in a recognisably authentic way gives the sim fan their thrills. It’s why there’s a button for the windscreen wipers in Assetto Corsa Competizione.
It’s why you spend 20 minutes going through checklists before getting airborne in Flight Simulator 2020. And it’s why Peddlesden’s team has thought long and hard about the exact distribution of braking pressure between carriages in Train Sim World 4’s roster.
This is the seventh release of the series, not to be confused with Dovetail’s Train Simulator releases, and features three routes across LA county, Austria and England’s own East Coast Main Line. For the community, it’s a new base into which they can plug DLC from previous releases and build their personal library of routes and vehicles. For Peddlesden, it’s the expression of a lifelong fascination.
“I’ve been interested in trains all my life,” he tells me. “My dad was a train and bus enthusiast. We used to go out trainspotting every weekend. There’s photographs of me when I was small, sitting on the ground [at the train station], playing with a toy train while they’ve got the proper ones behind me.” It’s been about trains for as far back as Peddlesden can remember.
That interest escalated when train simulators started entering the game industry. For people like Peddlesden, the advent of Microsoft Train Simulator in June 2001 was the first chance to take the step beyond the model train sets and into something more interactive. It was also the first step towards making games. “One of the
