DavidBrown

In the UK, a 'City' is a legal status and has nothing to do with population, density etc. So, you have places like St Davids in Wales which has a population of less than 2,000, Wells in south-west England with just over 10,000 and Ripon in Yorkshire with nearly 16,000. None of these places are major commercial centres, nor are they at major transport interchanges or in commuter areas. One common myth in the UK is that a city is a place with a Cathedral, however there are cities such as Preston and Newport which don't.

The railway line to my town, Ilfracombe, closed in the 1970's. It was abandoned for a long time, but is now a cycle track, forming part of a network in north Devon called the Tarka Trail. There is a very, very old video of the line when it was open - from 1898! YouTube

I think those roads under the bridges are puzzle pieces (not part of the NAM) - I remember seeing them on the STEX quite some time ago.

This is known as a Whirlpool interchange - they're rare in the UK but, if I remember correctly, there are 2 on the M25 London Orbital. These interchanges are very large and take up a lot of land, which of course is the exact opposite problem in SC4. For me, a simple fork interchange is much more needed.

Wonder how many people on here watched this, and more interestingly as an international forum, who was cheering on Massa or Hamilton. Have to say, as a Brit, I am thrilled for Hamilton. I do also have a lot of sorrow for Massa, who did help make it undoubtedly the best F1 season in recent times. What a race it was though.

Couldn't find anything like this, though I am prepared to be proved wrong! Not sure how common they are in the USA (I would think fairly common since most of the downloads used are American!), but the UK has lots of out of town shopping centres - not necesarily indoor malls as such, but purpose built parades of large retail units. Here's what I mean - this is from my city of Exton. Mortehoe Shopping Park is located just off junction 3 of the M6 motorway on the very edge of the city. It boasts 20 leading stores, 4 restaurants, 2 supermarkets and petrol and railway stations. Over 5000 people are employed, and 3 million shoppers a year fill the 2700 space car park and spend around £1 billion every year. The site was built in 1994 amongst protests from retailers in Exton city centre, who feared that business would be severely affected, and local residents who feared traffic congestion. Mortehoe Park has many of the well known brands in the UK - Tesco, B&Q, Staples, ASDA (Wal-Mart) and Pizza Hut amongst others. OK, it's not exactly like a standard UK retail park - the lack of pretty much any UK BAT's doesn't help! Hopefully you should get the idea though.

Thanks for the comments. Archean - it does appear very rural, but it is on the edge of a large city on a major motorway, which they tend to be over here. As Godzillaman points out, it will probably be a large suburb soon! intensivecarebear - all I did for the roads was drag them two game tiles into the roundabout. For me it only works for roads and one way roads, and it has to be on the very edge of the roundabout as having a single road in the centre two tiles will cause the roundabout textures to go funny.

Owaen -very nice! Love the use of filter lanes. That sort of interchange (without the filter lanes normally) is very common in the UK - it's just called a roundabout interchange.

Here's one of mine - Croyde on the English Golden Coast. An overview of the town. It lies on the western coast and claims to be at the southern end of the UK's longest beach. St Brannocks Church was built in 1748 and recently had major renovation work to save it from falling apart. Large amounts of money have been spent on the Esplenade in the past year. The railway station has been upgraded and renovated, and a new police station has opened. The school has also recieved new facilities, including a skate park and tennis courts. The Pannier Market is a local landmark. Local produce, antiques and butchers set up stall every Wednesday and Saturday to showcase the best of local South Torridgeside products. Croyde Industrial Estate was built in the 80's to help boost the flagging local economy. It was built alongside the main A168 road and overall around 1000 people work there.

Surely that curve is just using several of the 45 degree gentle curve puzzle pieces off the NAM?

Seems that there is a lot more to this than the TV programme made out. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-16462190.html http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/news/Stab-accused-wheelchair/article-341915-detail/article.html So, from what I can make out, she caused chaos on the M6, then a few days later apparently stabbed someone to death, jumped off a bridge over a major road, and is now in court for that murder. Prehaps it's worth pointing out that the episode of 'Motorway Cops', which featured the M6 incident, was schedualed to have been broadcast last week, but at the last minute was replaced by a repeat, and shown this week instead. I think the fact that she's in court now may well have something to do with that. Utterly bizarre.

The TV crew were with the police officers as part of a TV documentary - a cameraman and presumably a soundman in the same car as the coppers featured.

Yes, I saw it last night on the telly - most certaintly the most shocking incident on our motorways for a very long time. By the way, the womer were Swedish, not British. The only thing is I'm slightly suprised that restrictions were not in place on the other carriageway - especially given that the woman in red was still consious the whole time. That woman got a punishment of one day in prison for assaulting a police officer - I'd have thought detention in a mental health unit would have been more appropriate.

I was wondering if there are any mods available for UK style level crossings, or if anyone has any plans to make them? Level Crossings are one of the few things left in SC$ that I haven't managed to make look more 'British' in some way, and having the default Maxis ones do make then stand out like a sore thumb.

Not as impressive as some earlier on in the thread, but it's not too often my highways get jammed like this. You can also just about see the avenue at the top getting congested.

You drive your car onto the train. Not exactly sure how it works from then on as I've never used it, but I do know that lorry drivers leave their vehicles and use a passenger car at the front of the train. This, in the event of a fire, obviously makes evacuation a lot easier and safer.

Basically yes, plenty of lorries use the Chunnel every day. There are extremely tight restictions on what loads can be taken through, as you would expect for a tunnel, but it appears as if this may have been breached as the lorry that caught fire was apparently carrying a toxic chemical. The road tunnel is not open to the public. It is a service tunnel for exactly this kind of emergency. It provides a safe refuge for passengers who are then taken back to England or France. There are lots of emergency link tunnels, where people disembark the train, use an emergency exit and emerge in the service tunnel.

Well I'm back on Simtropolis at last, now that I've got a new computer that can play SimCity 4. I've installed the game and everyting is running smoother than I could have ever imagined. However, there is one problem which I believe is down to my sound card. Whilst playing the game, the system (not just the game, but the whole computer) will randomly crash and reboot, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Occasionally a blue screen with lots of text (which disappears far too quickly for me to be able to read any of it...) will appear before the computer reboots itself. When the system is back up and running, I get the standard "The system has recovered from a serious error" message and the "Send Report" option. I send the report, and it will take me to the Windows Error Reporting page - and will come up with one of two pages. Here they are: (Hopefully they should work - please bear with me if they don't) The first one obviously telling me that I have a problem with the audio. I have a C-Media Wave device (not sure if that's enough info to be of use), which has no problems according to DirectX. The odd thing is that the problem only occours on SimCity and nothing else, and I haven't yet downloaded any plugins. I have gone through nearly everything suggested on Windows error reporting (although C-Media's website has no help page and I'm not prepared to disable my sound card when it works on everything else). Any extra help would be greatly appreciated.

Well it turned out that the problem was a faulty sound card rather than a driver issue. Put a new Creative SoundBlaster card in, and everything's OK now. Thanks for your help, anyway, tungston.

LeFail - I think the driver may well be the problem. I have downloaded a "Driver Detective" which tells me that I have a C-Media AC97, which needs a newer driver. However it doesn't tell me exactly what type of AC97 I have, so I have no idea which driver I need to download from C-Media's website. I do know that it is an external PCI card but no more. As for the blue screen, I had a camera ready when the system crashed again so here it is: http://img211.imageshack.us/my.php?image=errordk2.jpg Can't see a file name on there. tungston - I am on XP and not Vista, though as I say I think it is the fact that I don't have the latest driver which is causing the problem. Many thanks for your help. I should also say that other games are starting to crash in identical fashion, so it definately seems to be a hardware rather than a SimCity software problem.

Would something like this be possible: It would be a puzzle piece, with two sliproads facing in the same direction. It would link in to the existing elevated puzzle pieces, and could come with one-way, avenue and road variations. By the way, that is not a working model - it's just an image made on MS Paint!