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There are indeed several undesirable side effects. I haven't noticed so far what you describe, but possibly it depends on the map you're loading. In the Swiss railway scenario I play with, all trains return brand new after each reload and the medal-winning achievements I've made till that moment are recomputed and added once more to my records page. I guess all this has to remain a hack. The thing that works is smoothing the original map and prepare it for a game without modifications on the fly. Cheers, Marco

I like to play RRT2 on a big LG TV screen connected through an HDMI cable. Each time it's a tricky thing, because the game may crash at start randomly with a popup saying "DirectSound error #150" (99% of the times) or "DirectDraw error". After a few retries, everything goes well and the game displays on my TV. I thought initially that this was linked to Windows 10 hardware acceleration features, but I recently found another explanation. I understand that DirectSound was a popular sound library for games at the time RRT2 was developed. I haven't found info about DirectDraw, apart that it is "deprecated" (well, apparently it still lives inside the game :-). My understanding is that the versions embedded in my copy of RRT2 (which I purchased couple of months ago on Steam) do not play nice with the TV hardware. My hope at this point is to find some recent patch for DirectSound or DirectDraw that magically will solve my problems. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

> anytime later you also can put the cursor over a station to check. If the town name remains normal, it's not really "connected." > Only the first "connected" station gets the town/city name by default peripheral stations and later stations get those a those annex names. I'll try to take a snapshot and post it here of a borderline situation wrt what you both describe here: there is this swiss town promising 200k to the first baron stopping there. I put my station at the outskirt of town, but it's large and the houses are all covered. The town looks "connected" when I hover the mouse above my station, but I don't get the prize. I put a small station right in the center of the houses and I finally get the money. It looks like the mechanism for getting the dough is tied to some small distance value from the exact town location, as you can see in the map editor.

> Do your differently named stations, e.g. XXX Junction as opposed to XXX, cover fewer houses than the generically named stations? No, what I describe is a situation where is no station "XXX" at all. The station gets named "XXX Junction" because (AFAIU) I happen to place it not sufficiently close to the town. For example, sometimes I don't want to cross a river to reach a town, so I just stay at the opposite side and buy a large station that extends its area deep enough at the other side. > Further stations are called Chicago Adjunct. That's nice. Thank you for the digression. I never got beyond Depot... > We are free later to set our own names however we like You mean that it's possible to rename stations? Or just to rename the "adjuncts"? It would be great to be able to rename stations. With all due respect, "Milano Junction" sucks.

Sometimes the placement of a station ends up with its name being "XXX Junction" instead of "XXX". Town XXX is connected and my station covers all of its houses, yet I have the impression that I get less passengers than what the number of covered houses would assure. Am I right? Is it so that passengers "dislike" stations that do not carry the plain name of their town? On the same topic, is it possible that small stations (price 50k $) do not gather all the passengers of the houses they cover?

@jeffryfisher - that's correct. But it's also a hack 😉

@MikeC - never tried those, I mostly stick to Europe. But I am sure that such a train would be lovely to watch during its ride, which is the main reason I run trains in the mountains 🙂.

@jeffryfisher - yes, more than twelve. Full output of three logging camps. I've found this page, which implies that businesses like coal, cattle or bakeries will NEVER turn a profit: https://railroad-tycoon.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Industries_in_Railroad_Tycoon_II Is this the reality?

Forgot to mention that the game file has to be renamed from .GM2 to .MP2 in order to be loaded in the editor. Afterwards the suffix has to go back to .GM2 I found out that the impact on the game economics is due to the fact that the saved file receives the same date as the start date of the scenario. It is sufficient to note down what year it was in the game, and set the same year from the editor before saving the modified map.

During gameplay, I stumble on situations where the AI is unable to build a realistic track where realism should allow it. It happens all the time in mountainous terrain. I accept that there shall be slopes: it's mountain, after all! But in some cases the railway comes out in such a way that no train will ever be able to travel across it. In such cases it is kind of cheaty but nice to load the game in the map editor, smooth the terrain and go back to play. The hack that I am experimenting works this way: - copy the .GM2 file from the games dir to the maps dir - load the .GM2 file in the editor, modify the terrain and save it again - copy back the GM2 file into the games dir and play it Is there a more straightforward way to do this (e.g. to teach the editor to look for files in the games dir)? BTW it looks like this hack of mine modifies somehow the economics of the game: train revenues are multiplied two/three times. That's not desirable, because the game becomes too easy to play afterwards... Any comment is welcome. Thank you for your attention...

There is something I don't get. There's this lumber mill with "poor" profitability. I buy it and start shipping loads and loads of logs. It produces lumber and I take the lumber to the city. The train makes some lukewarm profit. But year after year the profitability of the mill remains apparently poor, and I get a pittance profit from it. It will never repay its cost, let alone turn a profit. Why is it not profitable to buy the "poor" industries that I later make work? Am I missing something? Any word of advice is welcome...