I figured out that I might have 260 Payware locomotives & railcars from N3V, K&L, and JR ... I might buy the N&W J at the end of this month ... but I think I have more than enough stuff, that I can possibly run in my entire lifetime ... I think I have 553 locomotives & railcars installed, and 27 consists in my CM
My main RR's I have in my collection are eastern and southern roads, ie: PRR, NYC, RDG, CSX, NS, CR, N&W, C&O, B&O, SOU ... Although I do have every paint scheme "Heritage" loco, and some Western and Canadian locos, that I bought on a 75% -50% off super dooooper sale ... I went completely hog wild when some locos were $1.88 - $3.75
I tried iPortals, and considered that if a second person in the room (or online) on a separate PC, were to send consists from their route(s) on their PC ... to my route on my own PC (like a dispatcher), that might work
I considered building a staging yard route, and cloning it, and renaming each cloned route with a different name ... ie: "iPortal China" where I keep all my Chinese locomotives & rolling stock ... and "iPortal PRR", where I keep all my PRR locomotives & rolling stock ... etc ... etc ... I would eventually have @ 20 similar cloned route versions, all name differently ... The problem with that is that naming all the iPortals, and individually configuring each and every iPortal, on the many routes would be really meticulous, and time consuming
I considered building just one Staging Yard route, and storing each and every one of my 260 Payware locomotives & railcars, 553 locomotives & railcars installed, and 27 consists, as well as storing dozens and dozens of 1 mile long custom assembled consists, all with @ 300 drivers pre-installed in each consist, all ready to be selected, and run onto the route, via a distant tunnel entrance/exit
The problem is the huge number of drivers needed, I presume you can place many multiple duplicates of example: "Adair" ? ? ?
I have also considered just using plain Portals, or hidden underground subway tunnels, where trains are emitted/consumed
The overall problem is framerates, and route lockup ... on account of placing 300 consists, and hundreds of railcars, on one single route ... what can Trainz handle, before framerates become ridiculously stalled ? ? ? ... And what can a PC handle in Trainz, before locking up ? ? ?
On the other hand ... I could just assemble a never ending list of @ 300 "New Consists", and store them in my "Consists" surveyor picklist ... the drawback there would be that you have to exit the Game constantly, in order to place a "New Consist" on your outbound "Ready Track"