Combination of two post ideas today. First, a few more shots from Iron Mountain Pass, then I’ll give my impressions on Trainz: A New Era’s current released actual version.

The railroad and the river diverge here. There will, eventually, be a town here of to-be-determined size.

The weather starts to turn nasty as we head up the pass.

Now: T:ANE impressions. I like it. I like the game very much. Importing content from Trainz 12, the previous game, is remarkably tedious, but not entirely onerous and the game can either look or run like a dream. I say either; I’m sure that on an extremely high-powered computer, one could get acceptable framerates with the gorgeous graphics that the new engine lends the game. However, I’m beginning to realize that my computer is probably in the higher middle range, not the high end, and so if I turn up post processing (which makes the game look its best), I get a slideshow. So I intend to build my routes with low graphical settings, and do screenshot runs with higher settings. But, even with these and a few other minor problems, I find I like the game very much. I haven’t played around too much with this version (all these Iron Mountain Pass shots were taken on the pre-release version), but I think it will be a very worthy successor to the Jet engine-based Trainz series, and an excellent platform for the next generation of Trainz games to be constructed upon.