Using Villages

[jeffryfisher]

This is probably old hat for the regulars, but I'll mention it since I don't see it elsewhere:

In the right situation, villages (places with only 1-3 houses within a station radius) can be a vital source of pax & mail for trains leaving a terminal with light loads. What's needed is a "real" city beyond the villages to provide the demand at one end of a main line (connected through the villages to some large trading partner(s) at a distance).

With an imbalance to correct, any village near the solo city's end of the line can add pax and/or mail to trains leaving that city. That's because the village(s) won't eat pax/mail on arrival.

This worked well in the western half of the USA map where there are just a few cities along the coast trying to keep up with buckets of pax/mail from the more-populous eastern third of the country. I would have each San Francisco train pull out with only one load, scheduling it to add a car in Reno and make stops in Winnemucca and Elko. By setting half-fills and keep-aboard flags, San Francisco's 9 houses were effectively increased to 16.

In this particular case, the time-cost of whistle stops was probably more than offset by having light-weight trains climbing the grade up the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. 2-car trains were making 7-11 mph, while 1-car trains managed 11-17 at the same reference points -- a 50% speed increase over multiple "months".

Note: One must keep an eye on any village having 3 houses. When it ticks up to 4, it needs to be assigned one or two of the trains it was supporting, and then removed from all other schedules.

[Gwizz]

You could always bulldoze the new house to keep from changing train routing.

If I remember correctly someone in the past tested this action and said it was not cost effective.  I don't remember why.

But, I still like the idea and continue to use it when I'm not playing for a win. 

I even drop all cargo and reload it, knowing it is more costly doing this, But, easier on my forgetful memory.

I wish there was a button that I could push that would let me choose which trains I wanted to manage or not.

[jeffryfisher]

My wish list thread includes display filters on the train lists and (I think) a link from the station detail view to a list of trains currently having that station in their schedules.

Maybe each station should also have a check box for "alert me when if this station adds or drops a demand", because I also hate it when an industry vanishes without telling me. I guess I would hate it even if I were being told, but at least I'd be able to fix the trains that had been depending on it, and that would be easy enough if the station display got me to the short list of trains that call there.

Another wish: If a station is destroyed by an event, then do something to tell me which trains are having their schedules mangled. Replacing a station is usually easy, but finding a dozen trains among hundreds can be tedious.

If I were updating the game's programming, I would add several new stop "flags", and one would be an "invalid stop" flag. With my train-list filtering, I'd be able to see all of my problem trains quickly so I could fix them.

[alexgophermix]

That's a neat trick I hadn't thought of that, thanks :)

I also wish that it would tell me which trains had their schedules mangled... that can be such a pain to find the right trains later in the game