Stations as Freight Magnets

[Orange46]

In the manual or someplace, the game suggests that you build stations in cities and not at industry sites because eventually the freight from outlying industries will start gravitating toward the stations. Well, they don't. Unless the city has a user of that cargo, stuff doesn't really reroute itself thru my stations.

So, a change that I would make to the system in a future game would be to make all stations attractors of all freight. They probably shouldn't attract at anywhere near the level that an industrial user would attract the cargo, but they should attract at a level of more than one or two houses. In real life, those wagons would not just keep heading toward their industry along the shortest cowpath if a RR (not even a station) existed, even if that station was in the opposite direction (but not too far). So, even tho a city might not want iron or wool, it's station should attract iron and wool and everything else.

[WPandP]

I agree wholeheartedly with this... and it even seems like something that could be done via a patch! I haven't tried modding a station yet, but I bet you could give it a sliver of demand the way houses work. Maybe the problem with doing so would be that the station would actually consume loads, rather than just collect them. But, maybe there is an okay balance point where it only consumes a little bit, yet adds enough demand to get loads moving towards it.

I might play around with this concept in the upcoming weeks, though I have no time to do so right now. Have any other building modders tried to do this to a station?

[djrail]

Excellent idea!

Something that I have always secretly hoped for too was that if you plant a station in the middle of nowhere the odd dwelling would pop up at some point too. Should a small town not rally around a station?

The station needs employees...any resource development in the immediate area needs workers...and if you plant an industry that would require staffing too.

Taken to the extreme (like city - new town - new town - new town, etc - all within a few track segments) you might be gaming if you drop a station at every resource, but could there not be a happy medium?

Possibly the station has the existing "capture" zone and also a larger "exclusion" zone within which another station cannot be planted!

[Orange46]

I have no idea where it is, but my suggestions posted somewhere for RT4 (before SMR came out) included a scheme where towns were created by the presence of stations, along with a number of pre-set towns supplied by the scenario designer. In Europe, this might not make sense, but in North America and Austrailia, this makes a lot of sense. I also wanted a sort of mini station to exist at any track end. As a part of the concept, once a map square was included as a part of a city, it could not belong to another city. Further, as in SMR, a station in any part of a city would show available goods for the entire city, not just what's near the town/city/burg. Cities would develop from hamlets or whatever (whistle stop) up. Also, goods that already found a user would not be available for the station to ship. Finally, station size would affect loading times for passenger trains and how many people would wait at the station, post offices similarly for mail, while a separate improvement, extra tracks, yards and hump yards, would affect how much freight could wait at the station and how fast trains could turn around.

Also, basic industries would need to have one house to supply workers, otherwise the industry would just sit. Larger industries would need more, and extra houses would be needed to cover the non RR part of the town. It does start to get complicated, so at some point enough is enough, but extended out people would have to migrate, etc. (Sounds like Sim City meets Civilization and RRT, but Sid would never go for that.)

[Orange46]

WPandP,
It never occured to me that this could be modded. Yes, it sure would be an acceptable comprise even it it meant that a tiny amount of Uranium had to be ingested by the station employees. Most freights, however, probably do get used to some tiny extent in even the smallest of towns that merit a station in RT3.

[milo]

In the manual or someplace, the game suggests that you build stations in cities and not at industry sites because eventually the freight from outlying industries will start gravitating toward the stations. Well, they don't.

You can effectively hike prices at the station simply by having a train wait at the station with an auto-managed (NOT custom) consist of the cargo you want. This will eventually raise the cargo price at the source station to close to the price at the target station.

[WPandP]

If the price at the source station goes up to meet the target station's price, then won't the loaded train be worth a lot less? And eventually not even load up anymore, because there is no price difference any longer?

This may be how it works now, but it doesn't seem right. Real railroads don't park entire trains while awaiting the producer to load them up. The producer stockpiles his stuff until he can fill a car, at which point the railroad delivers him a car to load. Then, from that point on, the loaded car ideally takes the least time possible to roll across the rail network and get where it is going, with notable exceptions being the slow-to-degrade cargoes like coal.

In game terms, freight ought to accumulate at a "loading zone", to be ready to fill up a train and go. A tiny demand at the station seems like it would work for this purpose. I would still want there to be a significant price differential between Westtown and Easttown, to justify hauling all that distance.

[Orange46]

Milo, if you park a train at a station with no cargo at it, the trains presence will not have any effect. A waiting train (or any train that stops and picks up the cargo) raises prices because it removes the cargo from the station square. Whenever a train delivers a load to a station, the price goes down because more cargo is present. As that cargo gets used, or if it gets taken away by a train, the price starts to go back up again.

When no users of a cargo are on the map, the price stays at zero (e.g. bauxite before any mills appear). When a mill finally appears, the bauxite price starts to creep up, first at the mill site square, then slowly expanding around that square. If the ore is located any distance from the mill and if it is not in a station square, it will just sit, because the price will remain at zero for many years. It can't move to a station until the station's price rises and if the station is not between the mine and mill, then even when prices do rise, the ore will head toward the mill, not the station.

I actually liked building stations near mines and farms in RT2. The cargo seemed to appear faster than in RT3, so you could justify devoting a train to this mission. In real life, the farm is the local silo that farmers truck their grain to, and grain cars sometimes sit on sidings waiting for loads when it is not the busy season. In RT2 you could build the silo and that kept the cargoes fresh longer.

[djrail]

I actually liked building stations near mines and farms in RT2. The cargo seemed to appear faster than in RT3, so you could justify devoting a train to this mission.

But, and please correct me if I'm wrong, if you plant a station whose "capture zone" includes the resource, it does appear at the station. It's just not going to "attract" anything outside of that capture zone?

I will sometimes devote a small station exclusively to a resource needed elsewhere and it seems to generate cars worth of the material. Of course, I guess if I just left things alone the resource may eventually wander toward the user...so maybe I'm just capturing the stuff that hasn't walked yet with my station & train?

I still like the idea of somehow starting "boom towns" in the middle of a bunch of resources and having houses, etc. spring up around the railroad town's station.....