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A quick update on my recent trucking and an answer to yesterday’s question 🙂

In Euro Truck I completed the ‘Start Your Engines’ event and I’ve subsequently repainted the Iveco Hi-Way in the special paint job that I earned. Here she is speeding along an autoroute in France with one of the event’s Krone / Good Year trailers in tow…I had great fun driving the Iveco during the event. It once again proved to be the surprise package. Despite initial misgivings prior to driving one for the first time a few months back I can report that it’s up there with the Scania S series. My only gripe is the position of the mirrors but I’ve seen worse!

Returning to American Truck Sim after a long absence and two game updates I expected problems and problems there were! The game would crash after a few minutes so I disabled all the mods. Then I had no sounds – the cause of that was removing one of the engines mods that improves the accuracy of the torque curves for the in-game PACCAR and Cummins engines. There is a repair mod from the maker but I’d forgotten all about that. In the end I decided to uninstall and reinstall meaning a full restart on a new profile. I know that can be annoying for some of my fellow virtual truck drivers but it’s not the first time I’ve gone for a clean start and it won’t be the last. I find it gets you out of any ruts you’ve created for yourself and everything seems fresh and new.

In fact there is some new territory to drive through within California. I set up my new company back at my favourite location of Bakersfield. I’ve called the company Cal Republic Transport. I took the ‘introductory’ driver for hire job across to Fresno in a Peterbilt 389. The next trip was to Santa Maria which involved travelling through some new scenery that was added when SCS simulated the Big Sur Landslide by closing part of Highway 1 and extending the mapping of route 101 up to Santa Cruz and San Francisco. I took the next job up to Santa Cruz. From there I picked up a job to Carson City in Nevada. That trip takes us through Yosemite National Park 🙂 In the real world you can’t take a truck through there but this is not the real world. You arrive at the gate house to be told to turn around. When you ignore the instruction and continue into the park you get a $360 fine – don’t think that will deter me from driving through again 😉 The route that SCS have mapped is Tioga Pass (Route 120) and here’s a view of me driving a Kenworth W900 on that hire job with a load of ploughs as I pass Tenaya Lake……It’s a great addition to the California map. I wonder if you still get fined if you drive through without a trailer? Must go back and get some more shots and I must also pay a visit to Death Valley which is another recent route that I haven’t driven yet 🙂

Back to the new company. I’m playing this one quick and dirty – Buying my first truck at the earliest opportunity. From Carson City I picked up another hire job back to Bakersfield and that got me to $30k. I took out a $100k bank loan and popped into the Bakersfield Peterbilt dealer. I came out with a nice new Peterbilt 579. She’s a Duty Cab version with the short 6×4 chassis and a Cummins ISX12 425hp engine. I’ve got the Eaton Fuller 13 speed box but no retarder. I splashed out a bit on a metallic green paint job and as a special treat had an SCI steering wheel fitted too. I drove out with $3.5k change from my $130k budget. A word to the wise at this point – don’t cut it that fine in Euro Truck. If you don’t know why, go and read my ‘Building a Trucking Company’ posts! Here is my new ‘579 with her first load – cars from Bakersfield to Yuma……and this is the view from inside……I just love that green carbon-fibre wheel 🙂 I’ll be adding more things to pretty her up as I go along and eventually I’ll expand the garage, get another truck and hire someone. As always I’ve got some rules that I adhere to that add to the difficulty. As she’s not a sleeper cab I’ll have to arrange my trips to allow me to check into motels for my rest stops rather than pulling into regular truck stops. That adds a bit of extra planning into each trip 🙂

Finally, back in Europe and the explanation of the anomaly in the previous post. In the image we can see a Lamborghini of the Polizia – an Italian police force. But the road sign indicates a turn off at the next junction for Bourges which is in the centre of France. Just like Buford T Justice this guy is way outside of his jurisdiction! It really ought to be a Gendarmerie Nationale vehicle stopping the errant motorist. Here’s another example also in France……Again we have the Polizia Lambo but the attending fire appliances are correctly liveried Sapeurs-pompiers vehicles. It’s just a minor bug that seems only to happen in France and I’m sure SCS will fix it in the near future 🙂