Thanks for sharing! Enjoyed reading that and seeing some of the locos featured here talked about. It explains why the engine on the 127 drops to idle for a while at 44mph, which was puzzling me, as it's changing from the torque converter to direct drive. Nice!
Also, I was growing up in the UK at that time so it's always interesting to get perspectives on what was going on.
One small thing I've noticed (and it is small and may already be taken care of in the next patch): ESC from the game opens the menu but to return to the game one has to use the mouse. Do you think it might flow better to also allow resuming the game with ESC?