Now what if you integrated all depots together?
But why would that be an important improvement? Clearly things can go very wrong if you implement this, and it appears that to fix 'no route' issues, the depots would have to become wormholes. magically transporting trains from depot to depot until a proper route is found.
But the current system is fine. If you need to add convoys to a route, you look up the route in the schedule management (or click on the route in the details window of a station with excess cargo) and then find the nearest depot to the stations on the schedule. At least this way you know that a train
will find a route, since it did so before.
The only hassle is hunting down the correct depot. Possibly, it might be worth having the route memorize where it was first built, and allow the player to click in schedule management to pull up that depot's window. But what if you delete that depot, or if you want another depot closer to another station on the route?
I think it's fine as it is. The idea of a "virtual depot" is simply as a reference for when you have no depots of that kind, and mostly (at least in this thread), as a place to define trainsets -- which is the topic of this thread.
Speaking of trainsets, I'm unclear as to whether these would be defined and stored per game save file, or whether they would be stored per pakset. If the latter, then how would the game handle convoys that contain parts that haven't yet been introduced (with time-line games)? Would these be listed (but if you chose one, you'd get some or no convoy parts) or would the data structure for the trainset also record the introduction date of the latest part introduced, and only display the trainset in the list after that date?
I'd assume that people would want these trainsets to carry over from game to game, but implementing that might be a little complicated.