Sid Meier's Railroads!

Trains.com Train simulation software
1

I downloaded and ran the Demo software provided by “Fileplanet” and found it to be a good quality demo. It did have a few bugs on the tutorial. But it was free and the file size around 256 mb. As Demos go this one was a good peek into the retail product.

I purchased the game today in Walmart for about 36.00. A little bit off budget but I think this game does trains very well in the old “Tycoon” style. I found the profits/Costs to be quite active during a trains operation and it was easy to learn if a run is profitable or not. The routing information included things like uphill or down hill from one town to another which I thought was a nice touch.

The music and presentation of this game clearly showed the Developer’s love and previous rememberance of games like “Locomotion” way back when. I immediately noticed they left the tenders out of the engines and failed to add cabooses. I did not have too much of a issue with that but it would have been nice to at least finish the engines and cabooses properly.

I will provide more screenshots later on after the round of railroading.

Here is the website dedicated to the game:

http://www.2kgames.com/railroads/railroads.html

I have played the game for a period of time today. I think they might release a patch to address some of the little issues. I must emphasize that this game is designed to run on powerful computers based on the Nvidia GForce 6 and 7 series cards.

I have a 12 pipe 6800 card and it ran ok in medium detail. Constant saving to hard disk minimized the loss of progress due to it’s occasional crash. I think they did a good job with the product but give it 7 anvils out of 10 in my very unscientific assessment.

I cannot stress enough that you need to examine the system requirements and try to have the best hardware on hand before attempting the run the game. I have a custom system which I built for gaming two years ago and it ran "R

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I too downloaded the demo from Fileplanet, and I enjoyed it as well. The graphics are good, and I liked the music (especially when I went to choose a locomotive. “Chattanooga Choo Choo” plays in the background as you do this). It sort of bothers me that the steam engines have no tender though. Oh well, I can deal with that. Yeah, traffic can get clogged up pretty badly, so in the freeform mode, I layed down about three sections of track beside each other to help in this. But other than that, I liked it, and plan on getting it soon. It does require a good graphics card, but I made sure to get one of those when I bought my computer system (an XPS 400 Dell System to be exact. I like it too.)

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There is an unofficial “patch” that puts in the tenders at http://hawkdawg.com/rrt/smrr/smrr.htm.

It also rescales the engines so they are more in line with the cars.

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I downloaded it too. I have had nothing but fun learning with the demo. I have had more clogged track than my real layout. Each time I play I loose lots of money. Then I start over the next day. Hey, I’m a rail barron so I could afford to loose my shirt every night. Buying new shirts is more fun than laundry! All kidding aside. Great game, lot’s of fun. I’m looking to downloading other simulaters to play. I’m running a Dell XPS 400 loaded up. The duel core and card makes the game fly. Mike Rapp

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The game does not use the dual core yet. There will be new games released that will utilize the full dual core and 64 bit artecheture (Spelling is bad I know) coming into play as I write this.

Traffic problems in the game is managed by laying a big three track main from Wash to NYC and feeding it with passengers who might stop at Wash, then balto then Harrisburg or Phila and return. Smaller towns will have thier own shuttles connecting the major urban areas.

Now Industry is a problem traffic wise. Ive learned to ship all of the coal to one end of the line and work it down using dedicated trains to get the product to the customer.

The stock market is a weapon. I had one competing railroad bury a big bridge blocking me from double or triple tracking. I bought that railroad’s industries, built new ones to sap traffic and revenue off that offending railroad. Then used the revenues to buy offending railroad, liqudate it and demo the offending bridge.

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There is now an official patch out that fixed many of the bugs - go see here.

Also there are now plenty of mods out for the game that improve the experience (bigger maps, tenders for your trains) - this forum’s the best summary.

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I was a huge fan of RTII, then the gold edition with 8 car trains and station drop off/storage and routing through waypoints- major improvements, all it needed was signals.

RT III was a bit of a disapointment, great graphics, but horrible play. It was much better to just plan the route and let the computer play. BOOOO!

SMR has the missing componats of RTII and III- signals and real multitrack, but left out the routing and storage!! I also liked the multi componant resourse chains.

I’ve found that you have to be careful how you multitrack- pay attention to where you put crossovers, so trains can get around each other.

Sometimes the smashboards that come up if a track can’t be accessed never go away, even if you complete the connection- usually this doesn’t affect trains, but sometimes it does.

I’ve found a couple more glitches that I haven’t seen elsewhere-

If you change a train’s route, for some reson it goes to the second assigned station first. This forces juggling of routes- annoying!

Sometimes a train will “disappear” from play, although it continues to accrue maitenance costs- if you select “view” from the trains screen, it just flys the camera to an uninhabited corner, usually over water- it must be deleted to avoid spiraling losses.

Sometimes a train absolutely will not move froma station, even if wait until full is not selected and track is clear- sometimes changing the class of train will fix this.

Sometimes a 1st class train will yeild to an inferior train- ???

Somemtimes a train will chose a congeted track, and wait behind another train over a free track, even though it could proceed unblocked and crossover further down- ???

[2c]

8

I learned something tonight about classes of trains.

At first give a Grain train from the grain farm to… Harrisburg a Low Priority. Ok no problem, it is usually like a short line on it’s own track.

The problem begins when the train arrives at Harrisburg and attempts to complete delivery. On my map Harrisburg is a Division point for that line serving three other cities with Passengers and mail on two tracks (Cross overs, switches, bypass etc etc etc out the wazoo along with; the one big Passenger/mail train -6 coaches and two mail and so what if it’s emopty half?-)

These thundering passenger and mail trains run over the poor grain train with high priority and it forces the grain train to sit, creep, stop. Sit etc for unacceptable time. So I give the grain train high priority.

Classes dont work but can be useful to forcefully stop one train that managed to stop up the traffic from time to time.

The game does allow the Reefer Train sitting at Harrisburg waiting to load off the food plant (Who is waiting on the grain train) without stacking trains everywhere waiting on it as in previous rail games.

The computer introduces a further twist when it discovers a connection via the grain farm, especially when I add track to it from the back door to feed a SECOND food plant down the line. Suddenly that sleepy grain farm has Passengers and Mail thundering through totally by-passing the carefully built three track main.

Creting 8 Food Loads can take several game years. I wish they just dispense with the years and just move on because to imagine a train rotting at Harrisburg and actually going thru three new engine upgrades making ZERO dollar and running ZERO miles in 8 years.

I like to get 2-4 loads on each train to a city that way they can get loaded and gone by the time the game year is up. Once I stack more industry in Harrisburg I can then subdivide that food train into a Manifest with… 2 of Food, 2 of Steel, two of newspaper. What to do with the last two cars

9

I’m having trouble with this. It works fine with no patches installed, but as soon as I install either the 1.01 or 1.1 patch, it reverts back to no tenders and out of scale engines. Am I missing something? I’ve tried both installing the tenders files first and installing the patch(es) first. I really miss the tenders, and am fixated on this patch. there are no special instructions given. Thanks.

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Well I got it. Apparently after patching, you have to open the xml files and save them so the date changes. It’s a nice mod, but that’s kind of a strange and very specific thing to leave out of the readme instructions, and only have mentioned in one post out of 25 on two different forums (not this one) :slight_smile:

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I got it for Christmas, but I am losing interest fast. There is not a real challenge to it, aside from racing the computer to buyouts. The computer will also avoid doing something which comflicts with one of your scenario goals, so if one is to own x% of another railroad, it will stop buying other stock for a long period to give you a chance to buy it up.

I don’t have any problem with having trains wait too long to load. You have to sort of prime the pump first by just shipping the first products out. The factory then seems to get the idea and begins to convert deliveries a lot faster.

The model seems to encourage you to build lots of little rail lines with parallel station tracks rather than an integrated rail system. It is easy to get trains stuck with opposing movements. You really have to plan passing tracks and how stations are assembled (It reminds me of transportation tycoon in that respect). I think players would be better off being able to place their own signals and, like in Locomotion, being able to directionalize some tracks with signals (that game lost my interest when computer players would build 50 mile long bridges over oceans and bays defeating the need for ships and some planes).

They do need to get rid of the years thing. It just isn’t working at the scale in the game. It worked in RRT and RRT2 because the trains were representing more activity. Now it just doesn’t feel right.

I don’t miss the tenders. I hardly notice the trains after a while. I am too busy managing track to look for possible traffic expansion and bottlenecks.

It is not as challenging as RRT2. Better than RRT3 though, in my opinion.

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I am maintaining interest to see if I can get every industry to serve all downstream customers in addition to passenger and mail. When these little villages become towns and mega cities it’s a real pain to actually schedule fast passenger and mail around the entrenched infrastructure.

Also I have learned to use the space between stations to create 50 mph switches that can allow trains to swap among any of the three main tracks in both directions. With each station covered on both sides by these flying junctions there is not much left where the trains can actually stay at speed.

I take the entire region and subdivide into groups of three or 4 stations off one master, so the passengers will be able to travel from any place to any place but the routing looks like a over loaded Greyhound bus schedule with lines to boot.

If a passenger wants to go from NYC to Wash and he or she vanishes at timbucktu halfway there is no apparent accounting for these people on the game. The number goes straight to Zero passengers and slowly accrue one or two passengers according to a set game speed. Having 4 shorts hit a division depot with 14 loads of passengers you would think maybe 4 or so wants to change trains and continue on to Wash. But no, everything goes straight to zero shafting the train to wash.

As a secondary impact, the division station demands 6 passengers, recieves 14 or so and gives me very little revenue. that encourages me to gut the NYC and Wash from the local network and build a pure NEC direct with no connections anywhere else. The time it takes for these NEC’s to transit the map “As the crow flies” are redicilously long.

I hope the next official patch makes for longer trains and tenders for the steam, I find it bugs me a little also.

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i have TRAINZ and it came with gmax a program that will let you create a object and locomotives except i dont know how to get to luanch or even find it. i need help NOW!!![banghead]

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[#offtopic]

Building objects and painting (Texturing) consist of many layers of information that has to come together correctly to work. There are lots of forums related to custom “Mods” for games that will help you with this.

It is recommended that you start your own thread about your problem with Gmax, burying this into a pre-existing thread which is being used for something totally different is not acceptable.

Besides I dont know a damn thing about Gmax and dont have the patience for it.