MLW GEVO audio, PennCoal ES44AC's and train brake blocking

[Shawmut]

I recently downloaded the only scenario I've found for the New York Division: Croxton Ordinary route - Horsehead Sunset. It uses for the player consist two locos from the old PennCoal addon: the ES44AC and the Dash9. As I long ago added MLW's sound addons for both GEVO's and Dash 9's, these two locos were automatically modded in my install. Both of those mods affect a variety of different locos, and RSC's PennCoal was one.

So I'm in the lead loco, the ES44AC, waiting for an NJ Transit train to pass by, and when the dispatcher gives me the green light, I attempt to release my train brakes. However, using the keyboard did not work at all, and using the mouse on the train brake lever proved extremely difficult - it took 3-4 passes for it to clear. This, to me, made the scenario unplayable. I tried re-downloading and installing everything in the hopes that I might have missed something, but no, I got the same exact results. Well, thought I, I've got other ES44AC's in my Assets folder, let's try the "ES44NSHP" NS Heritage Pack - lot's of 'em in there. Replacing the PennCoal lead loco with any one of the ES44NSHP locos worked just fine; the keyboard allowed me to clear or add brakes per usual. That being the case, I began to investigate the differences between that pack's locos and the ones in PennCoal.

I found that the Heritage Pack's locos had fewer options - both had default and DP (which I take it means Distributed Power) versions, but the Heritage Pack lacked PennCoal's no driver versions as well as the MLW-supplied "nadbr" versions. The manual that MLW supplies describes the "nadbr" versions as "none advanced brakes." So I substituted the scenario author's choice with the nadbr version, and lo and behold my keyboard controls worked on the train brake just fine. So this scenario is back on board this incredibly beautiful route.

That being said, I'm a bit confused as to what exactly a "none advanced brakes" version is. I'm pretty sure that the author meant "non-advanced brakes," but am still in the dark as to what exactly "advanced brakes" are in terms of DTG's terminology. Are these the brakes that produce the messages in the upper right of your screen that you can control the brakes from easy to hard (and vice-versa) by hitting CTRL/SHIFT-1 and -2? If not, what exactly are they?

Dave