Advantages and disadvantages of rail

[wuudy 0]

Hi guys I'm new here I went back to playing simcity 4 and i'm wonder about advantages and disadvantages of rail? What is your opinion about it?

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Bit of a tall order, but I make a lot of use of rail in my rural scenes that I am working on right now.  Ground heavy rail can be used anywhere to move passengers from home to work.  The stations are cheap enough, and intercity links are very easy to make.  They do, however occupy some real estate.

 

Rail comes in two flavours, Passenger and Freight.  They can run on shared tracks or you can separate them.  Passenger train acts like a road, but needs stations.  I recommend not putting stations on the main line, but set them up as terminals on spurs off the main track.  A spur is not a siding.  There is no through traffic in a terminal.  The train comes in, exchanges passengers and returns to the main line by backing out onto the line.  This will give better statistics on usage when the station is queried.

 

Freight only goes to the border or to a rail-enabled sea port, when it simply disappears.  The game doesn't have any real commerce, just going to and from work.  If tracks are laid within the industrial pods, adjacent plants will put their freight directly on the trains.  The tracks have to be close to the plant, without an intervening road, but there can be created as either spurs or sidings off the main line.  At least one freight station needs to be associated with each industrial pod to catch those freight trucks which are used when the sidings cannot be reached by the plants.  Freight will go to the nearest port or the neighbour connection nearest, then just vanish.  Adroit use of rail here will keep freight trucks from congesting the neighbour connections and adjacent roads.

 

Now, consider these to be only guidelines.  You can always do as you please.

 

As you catch up, you'll probably add the NAM (31.2), and I highly recommend this as an essential mod because it fixes so much that is wrong with the game.  Remember, you must be up to at least build level 1,1,638 in Rush Hour/Deluxe to use this and any other custom content.  For night scenes you need level 1,1,640 or 1,1,641 depending on the source of your game.

 

Subways are good and highly recommended using RTMT stations for heavy traffic areas.  And do not overlook the advanced darling of the NAM, Ground Light Rail (GLR or Tram).

[AcronShinra 60]

Rail is dirt cheap to place and maintain, have cheap stations, have no problems with crossing any network diagonally or perpendicularly, either over/under/through, is a bit faster than cars on roads and avenues, makes great intercity connections.

I almost always create 1-2 or more (depends on tile size) main rail lines that go through city working as support for main highway network.