coupling / decoupling trains

[Rampagerslife]

in short, a lot of regional and inter city routes throughout germany include the coupling and decoupling of trains along shared segments of their lines

i know there are "workarounds" and im not asking for roleplaying solutions, what i want to know is at the very least that if it isn't possible right now, when would it be?

[MirkoC407]

It is not possible right now. It will be whenever the developer feels the time is right to implement it.

This is a one man project, for which it is really impressive. But that also means that this one man can only work on one thing at the same time and digs through a long list of functionalities to be implemented.
Coupling and decoupling is part of this list, first steps were done already. For most of the time the game was fixed consists only. When setting up trains from individual vehicles was implemented and that question for splitting and joining trains at runtime came up, Carlos announced that this would eventually come.

Beside the constraints of a single developer having to focus, it is also important to consider that innovations need to come in a certain order and that we, the players, only scratch at the surface of what happens in the game technically. Fine, we have single carriages, so just split them somehow?
Not so easy, right now there are passengers on a train, that is just the sum of its carriages. When you want to split these, passengers need to sit in the correct carriage, or at least train part. The game needs to consider how many passengers can enter a joined train to destinations that are beyond the split, and / or what happens when there are now passengers on the joined train that are left behind when it actually splits into more parts. So that is why only Carlos himself can, if at all, say when this functionality might happen. However, we have seen obstacles that were not obvious when he started developing a feature, but would eventually delay implementation even one or two main patches down the way.
So it may be hard, but things "come when they come". Following Carlos' devblog entries is a good idea to get a feeling what is in the pipeline now and what not. There you will also find, which changes are imminent or sometimes some additional information why a certain feature is coming now despite it not being much requested, but eventually required to implement such a requested feature in a later version.

I also would at this point like to thank Carlos for maintaining a very open communication about how the game advances and keeping the players informed and involved in the development.