since I am still waiting for a reply in the official steam support forums (for 4 days now!), I wanted to try it here. I find it rather sad that I had to register in yet another forum to (hopefully) get any support from the devs, a simple ticketing system for support would be much easier and professional.

Anyway, here is my steam forum post with the problem.

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Bug – new game launch

I recently installed a vanilla version on a new PC. No changes have been made, the game is completely vanilla.

Now, when I try to start a new game, the game crashes after I clicked start. I get the following error message:
”
File: res/models/model/station/road/cargo_medium_new.mdl
This file contains malformed UTF-8 byte sequences. Thats probalby because it was saved with a different encoding. Please convert it to UTF-8 using your favorite text editor.
”
Since this is a fresh, clean install from Steam, I have no idea where the problem lies. Seems the install is faulty.
Please fix Train Fever team.

Thanks

PS: I realise this is a known issue, but the fix stated in the previous post (i.e. patched) is not true, game was only downloaded a couple of days ago, the fix supposedly occured on the 27th of March.