So often railways would upgrade old locomotives, by giving them new boilers with increased pressure, or maybe a Belpaire firebox instead of the original roundtop, or a new chimney design or whatever. This cost less than completely new locomotives. Or, maybe they would just rebuild the locomotive as original, but with new bits, which was also cheaper than a new locomotive.
People have grumbled about us not being able to do similar things in RT3. I think there might be a way to do it. Try this:
First you would need a territory-restricted AI company. It would need to be kept cashed up by event, but restricted from doing anything on the majority of the map. The idea is to basically hijack the AI company to provide a "locomotive workshop" that your company can access, without allowing the AI company to do anything else.
If an AI company has track and stations and money, it will always try to buy trains. These can be upgraded models, and can be confiscated to your company. You could do it the same way the additional track is purchased in AoS V. You could drive your old locomotive to a given point and stop it, then lay one track unit next to it. Result: your old locomotive gets destroyed and you get a new one, confiscated from the AI.
The whole thing can be made to work, except for one bit: how do you stop the AI company buying more locomotives after it has bought one? You can't test to see if a company owns trains, or how many it owns. You can only test indirectly for things like company cash. Once a suitable test is devised, stopping the AI buying more locomotives would be easy (set all to unavailable for that territory) but you will need some way of testing that the AI has actually bought a locomotive.
Ideas?
