Because of picture arrangements, this page is best viewed in FULL SCREEN mode! Tested on a 15" monitor, in Netscape 4.7

Bridge economy
Tunnel economy
Raising land from water - that's too expensive!!! - Well, not always.
A Bridge Too Far
TTd only. 'Buy land' ... what for?!
Use the water areas
Stations at sea level!
The tunnel TRICK: - NOT the tunnel CHEAT!!

Gradients, Chug, Chuuug, Chuuuhh, Breakdown
Train speed
Test those Vertical / Horizontal rails!

Seacrawler stations - advanced example!
Seacrawler stations - 2 methods for Oilrig grabbing

Bridge economy Both bridges and tunnels get more expensive per tile the longer they are. Also: bridges have speed limitations - TTo values:

• Length 2 to 4: Max speed 241 km/h with simple Girder Steel Bridge.
• Length 5 to 11: Max speed 241 km/h with Lattice Girder Steel Bridge, the horrid-looking 'steel cage' - can't see your train on it.
  
• Length 12 to 18: max speed 112 km/h with Steel Suspension Bridge. This medium-price bridge is OK early in the game (1930 .. 1934 TTo, 1950 .. 1957 TTd). Your fastest engine does 112 km/h.
• Over 18 tiles: NO BRIDGE POSSIBLE

Over land: It may even cost less than the 1 long one! The cost of raising small ridges in the valley is cancelled by the cheaper bridges.

You should always plan for 2 parallel lines, even if you only build the first one now; if your transport line is a good one, you will need 2 or more rail lines later.

Tunnel economy Like bridges, tunnels get more expensive per tile the longer they are; only more so!

Before making a long tunnel: save your game, then experiment with various solutions; comparing price and efficiency. and as always: plan for the future 2 parallel lines.

Assume 'NONE' area - no town authority problems. Alternatives to 1 (or 2 parallel) long tunnels might be:

• Simply lower the whole terrain! Often the best solution if most of the stuff is just 1 or 2 levels up. Avoiding tunnels gives you more flexibility with your future rail system: signals etc.
• Lower a few points in the middle of the mountain, to split your long tunnel(s) into shorter ones.
• Use the tunnel TRICK: when it will save you some money.
• If short on money now: use a temporary rail line around the mountain now; replace it with the best solution later. Rails can be picked up, you get some money back.
• Whatever you do: don't let your trains go up the mountain, then down again! This is almost always bad.

Split bridges over WATER??!!
Raising land from water - that's too expensive!!! Well, not always.

If you raise a point adjacent to 1, 2, 3 or 4 blue water tiles, it costs (TTo, early in the game) about 7000 to 28000 £ - UK pounds;
it costs (TTd, early in the game) about 10000 to 40000 £ - UK pounds;
Yes, expensive.

If you place 2 sea depots beside each other; then quickly!!! remove them, and raise the all-BROWN point in the centre of the tile left by the removed sea depots: This costs about: 2*700 + 2*90 for the sea depots; 1*250 to lift the brown land-point;
So about 1830 £ for ONE point.
Raising a series of points comes to about 1040 £ per extra point. (Prices: TTd, early, medium price.

quickly: To avoid the water invading while you are working:
You need to start from 'TIME stopped'; then, QUICKLY:
F1=start-TIME; "do 1 thing"; F1=stop-TIME;
..... repeat .....
NB! "do 1 thing" can be done with the 'Insert' key, once you've selected WHAT to do, and pointed the mouse at WHERE.

This may be tricky on a fast computer; You should place all the sea depots first in a regular, rectangular pattern, not criss-cross, interleaved!

then ALWAYS save the game before you start taking them away.
If water invades at every try: start the remove-depots at some other time, a little later. The water-invasion tends to be jumpy.
In my experience: avoid the start and end of a day. Do your water-building at noon!

It's usually easier if some days have passed between placing and removing the sea depots.

See also: 'Buy land' further down.

Three or more sea depots beside each other can be used to raise a small land ridge in the middle of water; use it to make 2 short bridges instead of one long one.

This also solves the problem of the bridge too long to be built, longer than 18 tiles. (Can't build bridge here!)

This picture was SLOWLY constructed on my square grid, with sea colors + rails from other TT snaps; I had no screen capture for TTo!

When making bridge-islands: always use minimum 4 sea depots, planning for 2 or more parallel lines of bridges! Or, if in TTd: 'Buy land'
Later raising partially BLUE sea points is EXPENSIVE.

Want to see this in practical use? Go out and find the
2070 download of Austrans Corporation , played by Satya. Look at the East coast of Australia - outside Brisbane - Sydney .... Magnificent use of sea space!

On a crowded map, it's often a good idea to build coastal rail lines out at sea; leaving the land for towns and industries.

'Buy land'? Finally, I've found a USE for it!
TTd only: On land, I see no point in the 'Buy land' function. It's much cheaper to just place a horizontal or vertical rail there.

But when raising land from (or lowering land to) sea level, the 'Buy land' button can be useful - The sea doesn't INVADE these tiles!

Using this technique, one can keep one's 'land from sea' projects rectangular, and one's options open.

Note: Raise land 1st; THEN buy.
Note: You still have to work quickly

Once you've learnt the 'quickly' trick, it is easy to raise water-land for other purposes too:

• Space for that LARGE airport; Osaka's airport was reclaimed from the sea. ... and Perth Airport, in my Australia game.
• A shelf along the sea for rails etc. is often cheaper to make by raising sea than by lowering mountains! And lowering mountains might make you unpopular with the town nearby (chopping trees), but raising sea hurts nobody; 'coast/riverbank' never has trees.
• 
  
  Extra land for city development. If the city CENTRE is near to water: the spirits of your future G-houses (Shop+Offices etc.) are hovering over that water! (and over that silly bridge!)
  
  
  
• A 'land bridge' (width 1 tile) over a lake may be useful for 2 purposes:
  1. To build a level 2 bridge! - This way, your train won't have to go down 1 level, cross water, then up again.
  2. For Extended station technique: maybe you want your railway station on the other side of the sea / lake from the Mega station's origin? (and walking around the lake is not on).

• Make a channel in to a resource, then place a Dock there. Even if you won't be using ships, Docks might be one leg of your Mega-station
• Make an inland canal for ships to follow. They travel straighter and faster in narrow channels!
• If level 1, 2 .... over the sea are too cluttered: you might lower land to level zero without letting the sea in!
  
• To tunnel under a town; it's possible to build whole rail systems with stations etc. at sea level;
  I experimented with this once - NB: a TTo game!
  a continuation of Thor Hovden's 'Deutche Bahn' game
  
• This might be used to build a level-zero City rail, tunneling under a level-1 city; since TT doesn't let you build real Metro stuff.
• But: better place some rails on your dykes! You don't want the city or the opponents lowering land just here ... letting the water in.

.

The tunnel TRICK: No, not the old tunnel cheat from TTo!

Dig a tunnel from the red arrow to the yellow one. The tile at the yellow arrow is a 'steep' tile. But you don't have to 'normalize' it by lowering land before tunneling! Just tunnel, the program will lower land for you.

You just dug a tunnel costing 4.8 K £; which you have to pay for.
But all those points of Rocky Mountains lowered behind the tunnel - 9.2 K pounds' worth of it - you don't pay for that! It's probably due to a program bug, like many other TT tricks and cheats.
Also: If the tiles indirectly bulldozed are expensive FIELD or RAINFOREST ones, you don't pay for that. . . But you do have to 'pay' in city ratings for the trees you chop.

So in the future, look for ways to make your tunnels cheaper! Example: Lowering 1 point to make a 'broken' or 'steep' tile may let you make a tunnel 1 shorter - saving lots of money when tunnels are long.

James Baughn's comment to this tunnel trick: "Maybe this can be used to get rid of odd corners at sea level?"
Yes!! Next 2 pictures show how.

In this picture from the 'Isolation' scenario, I've made a series of bridge-islands between Carupano and Santiago.
Note the length 4 bridge gaps; and extra width for signals on some of the islands; and 'reserved' land to the left, for 4 lines of bridges some day.
For now I need just 2 lines of bridges, for a 1-way rail loop. But the righthand line of bridges will hit that nasty broken land/sea point - see yellow arrow. Lowering that costs 10K £ - or???

Now lower 2 land points at the red arrows; cost 0.5 K £ (+ clear trees).
A short tunnel from land towards sea, and hey presto! the nasty point is down, and BROWN. Note that now (quickly!) you can lower the next point too (yellow arrow), if you want to.
Now delete the tunnel, and raise the 2 inland points again. ready for bridge!
Cost: 1.0 K to lower, then raise 2 points; 0.9 K for the tunnel; 0.1 K to delete the tunnel.
Total cost of operation: 2.0 K £ (+clearing trees)

Happy bridge-day!!
see also: Seacrawler stations - advanced example!

Gradients, Chug, Chuuug, Chuuuhh, Breakdown
This section was written from old TTo only.

Sometimes gradients can't be avoided; my old TTo tests indicate that the following hints will minimize the damage (loss of speed - increase in breakdowns):

• Let your train take all the gradients at one go; not split into 2 or 3 small uphills.
• Give your train a good straight speed-up run towards the hill; also some straight line over the top, enough to get the whole train up.
  Trains slow down at turns, remember!
• Mixed train? Arrange the wagons so that the when going uphill, the weight is forward, and the empties at the back.
• Arrange for some type of depot-force once on the train's circuit.
  The depot-force - when the train is EMPTY (or LIGHT); not when it's heavy. just before it loads up and goes off to make money - is the best moment.

Train speed
To keep up max speed, you need long straight flat rail segments. Avoid crooked lines, extra bends, uphills, etc.

To go e.g 8 tiles North, 9 tiles East: many use the same system as the computer opponent:
NS rails, then a bend, then EW rails. This is not speed efficient!

Test: Vertical / Horizontal rails!
If the terrain allows it: use long stretches of vertical or horizontal rails! Same cost, same no of rails; But your train travels faster - much faster! Don't you believe me?

Test run: In the picture below, the 4 tracks have the same distance - 39 rails - from depot to station. The 4 trains went off at the same time.
Track A: The usual winding route with many bends. Seen it before?
Track B: Same, but just one pair of bends. Better.
Track C: Horizontal rails short-cut most of the 'South, then West'. Good!

Track D: Start like C: But instead of the last 'South' stretch, there's a detour made of horizontal + vertical rails. 54 rails total, instead of 39!

Result: Train C is 1st - 14 days - the fastest track.

2 full days later, Train D - 54 rails - arrives slightly before Train B!

4 days after Train C, Train A chugs slowly in.

For my test I used weak engines, with empty but heavy wagons - each train weighs 260 t. Trip lengths: 14, 16, 18 days.

In TTo: for passing tracks etc, you may have to put in a few NS or EW rails, for the signals (in TTo no signals on Vert/Horiz rails)

A heavy train need lots of time to start up! So try to make it STOP as little as possible.

If you use passing tracks: try to engineer so that the empty train stops and waits, not the full one! Passing tracks with more than the minimum length often works better.

Make sure the heavy train goes NON-STOP to destination - no unnecessary stops at stations on the way.

at signals:
If a train has to STOP at a red signal, even for a short time, it will be slowed down, and start slowly up again.
So if you're watching that train: stop the train just before it hits the signal. When the signal is green, release the train again.
A train stopped by the player will keep the speed it had, for several days; and start up again at it's old speed when released.

Seacrawler stations!!
In ONE case it's possible to extend a TT station at TWO levels!
This can be done using docks to move down to sea level, or up to level 1 again.

Down at sea level, from sea depots placed there: quickly erase the depots, add bus stop, 1-track rail station etc on the brown tiles. Tricky to do - you may have to try a few times.
You could end up with:

• A railway station at level 0 (sea), protected by 'reserved land' or dykes; Note that depots also protect! - they don't sink!
• A railway station at level 1 on opposite shore! using docks twice, to go down, then up.
  Useful when a resource is on an island or oil rig near to the coast, but too far for a simple coastal dock to reach out to it.

I promised you a better seacrawler example - here it is:
In Delta North scenario (see Pedko's site), near Youngston, there are:
- 2 oilrigs and an oil well, not far away.
- a power station on an island.

My idea was to build a MEGA station like this:
- LARGE RoRo Railway station ashore - no bridges.
- Docks at sea, to UNLOAD oil, and take the oil away with trains.
- Develop the town, take some passengers/mail.
- 'Accept coal' - reach that power station.
The tracks from this station will take oil one way, coal the other way; along the East coast (Youngston- - -Lands' End, Roger Point). lots of cargo! and FAR!

But reach that power station requires advanced use of the 'tunnel trick'! in order to raise a small island for the final lorry stop: And along the coast, another tunnel trick is wanted; we probably need to raise a stripe of sea or 2 (see final picture), to have room for rail depots.

Fig 1 shows 3 sea depots for walking; with docks suggested at the ends. It also shows the 2 tunnel trick sites: T1 - t1, T2 - t2. The station has it's origin at 'O', and is walked out to the lorry stop now.

Fig 2: Tunnel T2 is straightforward, but #1 is tricky! we want tile 'a' up to level 1, by raising the 2 corners shown with grey arrows. But 1st we need to place a sea depot over tile 'b'+ it's sea neighbour, then delete it. For this to work, 'b' must become sea; but we want tiles 'c' and 'd' to remain brown until we're finished.
Depending on WHEN u start your tunnel, you may be successful. But you may have to temporarily 'buy' tile 'c' and/or 'd', to keep them from flooding too soon.
NB: Normally you could have built and deleted a dock on tile 'e', but the broken sea-point opposite stops this.
However - even with 'buy land' 3..4 times etc, the process is still cheaper than raising the original 1 broken sea point - that would cost 10000£.

Now The coast at t2 is straight, and island 'a' is OK. 2 sea depots have been deleted, and the station is walked some way out to sea:

Fig 3 shows the situation just after adding the railway station. One may NOT sea-walk further before doing this - then one gets the "Too stretched out" message.
And: the rail station can't be further inland! Or you wouldn't reach that power station!
OOOps! I now notice that the lorry and bus stops should have been exchanged! Moral: ALWAYS trial build MEGA stations.

After the rail station: delete docks, Bus stop, last sea depot. Walk on, and add docks against our 'a' island.
Now we can relax, do other things while 2 small station bits sink into the sea - saves us the cost of deleting them.
shape the town a little, we're growing it now, soon. - Fig. 4:
Add a bus stop near city centre; then add the FINAL lorry stop on island 'a' - now marked 'Y' for 'Yes' because it makes our station "accept coal". The 2 neighbour tiles 'n' do NOT accept coal, so we had to go all the way to 'Y'.
The coast strip south of our rail station is rather narrow - we ought to have done a tunnel trick at point 'c' too! We'll certainly need to widen that coast strip (d....d), for RoRo rails and depots.

Seacrawler stations - 2 methods for Oilrig grabbing
Did you know that you can grab that Dock+Heliport station on the Oilrig, and make it YOURS? - Walk it to a rail station? - Here's how:
Using Seacrawler technique (sea depots first), you can attach Bus/Lorry stop at one of the tiles 'behind' the oilrig - 'B' on the picture. Then walk on towards shore.
Note that now the name shield on the station is your colour, no longer 'grey for everybody'.
Since you can't delete the dock or heliport, you have to stay at L0, sea level. You could make your whole rail system at L0, water protected by dykes, bought tiles, depots.
NB: the 2 tiles marked 'F' in front of the oilrig are not 'sea'! They are underwater parts of the oilrig. So if you prefer to have your rail system at L1 level 1: you should raise some land from sea, and place a dock at tile 'd'.
This gets at the oil, and gives you a more manageable station; but now you do not have sole control of that oil; some of it goes to the original oilrig station - your opponents have access to that.

NB! Early parts of this file are from old TTo.
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