Upgrading track to high-speed

[atpat]

I had a thought about upgrading to high-speed. Consider the real world: typically, high-speed lines are not replacements for classic lines on the same alignment. They are usually built separately, sometimes entirely like Shinkansen or the UK’s HS1, sometimes only for certain stretches. If you don’t want to demolish your lovely railway and rebuild it to go high-speed, well, then don’t. Build a new high-speed line next to it and run your passenger service on that, using the classic lines only for goods and local services if you have any. The new line must avoid all the junctions with goods branches to ensure that goods trains do not use them, and will hence segregate fast from slow traffic.

Obviously if you already have a four-track railway with fast and slow lines then you could still demolish and rebuild…but this is an opportunity to improve the alignment to reduce curvature and gradient if your alignment is still what you built in 1850. In other words, demolish your old fast lines, leave the slow lines in place for goods traffic, and build a better-aligned high-speed line nearby.

[OzWally]

I like your  Idea.

Thanks!

[Yeol]

Indeed, you have a point… roleplaying wise. (thumbs up!)

But technically and play wise, it would be less frustrating to be able to upgrade tracks to highspeed as one upgrades to electrical track. It seems to me not to complicated for the programmes to make it happen. But it’s their call.

[BFalcon]

It’s not just a case of “roleplaying wise”, Yeol, but usually a case of track speed too – that high speed track is very sensitive to sharp turns, to the point of being no better than the basic track if you turn too sharply…

So, given that you likely built that old track when you had no money to spare and speed wasn’t an issue so much as not bankrupting yourself, there is a strong technical case to be made for relaying HS track rather than a straight replacement.

I’m not saying that I’d not like to see a straight “upgrade this line” option, just as I’d like to see upgrading a loco or rolling stock not zero the passenger/cargo count, but it does make more sense to lay a new line for high speed traffic.

Unless you’re playing on Hard, in which case… how are you making money with trains?? 😛

[bencze]

I see what you’re saying but building is quite a bit restrictive which means you need a lot of space for it because of collisions and whatnot. It’s not always simple and practical to build another line next to the existing one. For a junction sometimes you use like 1/4 of the map with curves and all and that’s a bit excessive. I agree that in real life building such things is difficult and painful but I don’t wish to replicate all the problems of real life in a game 🙂

Currently I try and build trains because I like them, not because it’s worth it. I’m not saying I necessarily want to run 200 (or 1000) trains on a map like in Openttd but it would be great to have the space and the financial gain to build and use so much more trains than at the moment. I play on medium. I find it that for industry it’s only worth it to use trains when I centralize the production and I feed raw mats to a factory that serves multiple cities (4-8), and even then only for the raw mats part. In my current game (small map) I made 6 train lines that connect my cities to a main one. It’s a hit and miss, I just rebuilt stuff and bought more modern trains and I lose like 10m-15m per month from all these trains. I’m sure it weill be better after like 10 years…

I’d generally like if we were able to use more lines, more trains, being Train Fever you know. Such restrictive building, expensive running costs, and having to upgrade manually are too much of a pain really. Rebuilding will always be an option, perhaps if we could see the speed restrictions of a line after it was built not just in building tool would help making the decision of upgrade vs rebuild, then it would be a real option.

[Author]

Posts