Efficient freight rail

[mittfh 7]

As far as SimCity is concerned, freight always travels from industry to the borders of your city (either by rail, road or seaport). Seaports are essentially "black holes" into which freight is dumped - AFAIK they're not used for importing goods (although there may be an exception for garbage deals).

However, if you're using a seaport with built-in freight rail station, you may be disappointed by the quantity of trains using your seaport. In my experience, most trains will offload their goods onto trucks at the freight rail station nearest to the seaport.

But what if you don't want hundreds of extra trucks rattling through your waterfront? As an experiment, I used SC4tool to modify my preferred freight rail station to remove the freight rail to freight truck movement. Since all freight trucks leaving freight rail stations are heading out of the city anyway, it shouldn't screw up the game (as long as you have a seaport or rail lines connected to other cities in your region!). And in my experience, it works exactly as expected - the freight trains are now "forced" to carry their goods all the way into the seaport.

However, as the game is biased towards roads, I found that many industries started to ignore rail freight all together, and truck everything the entire distance. Ensuring there are no road connections between your industrial areas and your seaport is easier said than done, so I'm now using the "No HGV" tile from the Traffic Control set on the access road to the seaport, so that employees can still drive to work at the seaport, but they won't have to compete with masses of HGVs ferrying goods in.

-oOo-

As an aside, it is possible to get PEG CDK lots to share the same waterside quay level as the seaport - you just have to be very careful with your levelling tools (and have lots of Simoleans to replace the seaport every time you accidentally destroy it!). Drag the banks on either side of the seaport out into the water, making sure you've left one tile clearance on either side of the seaport. Then use the outer corner lots to bridge the gap.

As an illustration (L = land, W = water, S = seaport):

WWWWWSSSSSSWWWWW

LLLLWSSSSSSWLLLL

LLLLWSSSSSSWLLLL

With CDK lots (O = Outer corner, D = 3x2 Dock, R = road, - = any other lot)

DDDOOSSSSSSOODDD

DDDOOSSSSSSOODDD

RRRDDSSSSSSDDRRR

--RDDSSSSSSDDR--

--RDDSSSSSSDDR--

[Rex Montana 0]

Can you make a screenshot?

[GoaSkin 2]

Freight rail is mostly blocked because the most custom passenger rail stations are configured very bad. In the transit properties a setting that allows freight trains to pass through is missing.