All Aboard Studios made its debut recently for Train Sim World 6 with the new Birmingham – Crewe Route add-on.

The Birmingham – Crewe Route Add On features a 53-mile section of the line between Birmingham New Street and Crewe via Wolverhampton.

The route is available for £29.99 and is available everywhere that you can get the stock Train Sim World 6 game from.

11 stations feature the new platform announcements that ship with the base game, with detailed stations at Birmingham New Street, Wolverhampton, Stafford, and Crewe.

Whilst other layers are available, the stock route comes with the Class 350 in 350/1, 350/2 and 350/3 with subclass-specific features and a number of liveries, including ex-London Midland, interim Northwestern livery and the British Transport Police livery applied to 350235.

Optimisation and Detail

As with the rest of the Train Sim World 6 franchise, the detail in the route is superb, with lots of lineside vegetation and detail.

The route runs well at 60fps on both our AMD system and our ROG Ally, which is great to see. We did notice a few stutters are we approached the bigger stations, especially Wolverhampton and Birmingham New Street.

Whilst they didn’t go away, it did get better as we built up the cache by playing the route more.

The one problem we have seen with the route from a detailed point of view is that at Birmingham New Street, there seems to be a strange lighting effect when one carriage is parked under the canopy and one isn’t, like in this image below with the Class 150.

General Gameplay

The route has a nice split at Wolverhampton, which means you can either go for fast express trains or stopping services.

Between Wolverhampton and Crewe, there are only two stations at Penkridge and Stafford, so trains get up to speed. However, between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, stations are every few miles, so you can get quite immersed in the busy stopping patterns.

If you have the extra layers, this takes the route up a notch with different timetable services with the likes of the Class 323s, 170s, Pendolinos and Class 150s. The new CrossCountry Voyager from the Train Sim World 6 launch also features.

Fancy something more heritage? You also get a range of railtour traffic, including Flying Scotsman. Alternatively, you can take the Class 66 for a spin with a freight service.

It would have been nice to see a reskin of the EMT Class 158 into Transport for Wales livery, however, we can appreciate the subclass differences to the TfW variant, especially given the in-cab signalling that the TfW units have.

Random events, a big bonus for TSW6, are also featured here, with a number of Emergency Speed Restrictions to keep you on your toes.

Any Bad Points?

There haven’t been many bad points from the route, but there have been a few bugs that have cropped up, and after a bit of testing, it doesn’t seem to be device-specific.

Firstly, as we have mentioned, there is a bug with the lighting at Birmingham New Street, but this doesn’t seem to happen anywhere else and also happens in a variety of weather conditions.

Secondly, on a few timetable scenarios with the Class 350, the on-train announcements get a bit confused about where it is.

For example, on a stopping service between Birmingham New Street and Wolverhampton, we departed Birmingham New Street and each time, the announcement said ‘the next stop is Wolverhampton, where this train terminates’.

This unfortunately continued throughout the scenario at each station. It did say this on leaving Coseley, so it was correct at that point!

Final Thoughts

On the whole, this is a nice addition to the game. It offers a nice mix of stopper and express services if you have the right layers enabled. When playing, you do see a nice amount of AI traffic at Stafford, Crewe and Birmingham, which adds to the realism.

Yes, there are a few issues like the lighting and sound issues, but I have no doubt that these will be fixed in an upcoming patch at some point.

For their first route for Train Sim World, All Aboard Studios has done a really good job on this route, and we look forward to seeing what they produce next!

Want to see the route in action? Make sure to follow the RailAdvent Twitch channel to see when I go live-streaming the route: twitch.tv/railadvent

You can purchase a copy of Train Sim World 6 on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation and on the Epic Games Store