Kicking ideas around...
Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2020 6:36 pm
I was just idly pondering scenario ideas. Seems to be a side effect of looking at all the existing ones while re-coding the site's pages. ![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
Couple of things occurred to me. One is the classic AI stupidity when laying track. Easiest way around that would be to use a no-access territory. If the AI can't get access to the side of a mountain, it won't be able to lay stupid track straight up at insane grades. You might be able to use a no-access territory to guide an AI along the bottom of a winding valley, as long as the route wasn't too complex. This is probably worth testing as it could improve results in a lot of scenarios.
Another thing was I was thinking about Brazil, and in particular the Sao Paulo Railway. This was an odd one in that it was only a short line (47 miles total) but at one stage it was the richest railway in the world. The reason it was so rich is that it was the only (sane) way of getting cargo down from the highlands to the port of Santos, and back the other way, so everyone had to use it to haul their stuff whether they liked it or not.
The section up the Serra do Mar was too steep for locomotives in the 1860's, being built at roughly 10% grade all the way. This was because the whole thing was built on a tight budget, and trying for more normal grades would have made the line impossibly expensive to build, so they went with steep grades and used cables running from fixed engines to haul the cargo cars up and down. IOW, no locomotives. Locomotives did the flat section from Santos to the bottom of the escarpment, then from the top to Sao Paulo, but were detached for the steep bits. It worked really well.
This would be easy to model in RT3, because there's no locomotive that's easier to model than a locomotive which doesn't exist. Which would be a nice change from obsessively detailing the little mongrels.
The escarpment could have pulling power reduced by event by a suitable factor (99% should kill just about everything) then the invisible non-existent locos designed for that section could have pulling power and free weight set to a suitably high level to compensate for the event (ie: FW 333 and PP 333) with top speed set to something like 10 mph.
That way you'd have to run the non-locos up the escarpment, because everything else would be stuck at 1 mph, and you wouldn't run the non-locos anywhere else because they wouldn't have enough top speed. You could still run fully loaded normal locos down the escarpment and get away with it*, but then they'd be stuck on the coast, so you'd need to buy new ones up in the highlands again. That should be a disincentive to "cheating", although no doubt someone would still do it at times if they really needed to.
*Because on a really steep downhill run the boost effect from the descending grade would be enough to get train speed up to useful levels, even with the event greatly reducing pulling power.
![Smile :-)](./images/smilies/icon_smile.gif)
Couple of things occurred to me. One is the classic AI stupidity when laying track. Easiest way around that would be to use a no-access territory. If the AI can't get access to the side of a mountain, it won't be able to lay stupid track straight up at insane grades. You might be able to use a no-access territory to guide an AI along the bottom of a winding valley, as long as the route wasn't too complex. This is probably worth testing as it could improve results in a lot of scenarios.
Another thing was I was thinking about Brazil, and in particular the Sao Paulo Railway. This was an odd one in that it was only a short line (47 miles total) but at one stage it was the richest railway in the world. The reason it was so rich is that it was the only (sane) way of getting cargo down from the highlands to the port of Santos, and back the other way, so everyone had to use it to haul their stuff whether they liked it or not.
The section up the Serra do Mar was too steep for locomotives in the 1860's, being built at roughly 10% grade all the way. This was because the whole thing was built on a tight budget, and trying for more normal grades would have made the line impossibly expensive to build, so they went with steep grades and used cables running from fixed engines to haul the cargo cars up and down. IOW, no locomotives. Locomotives did the flat section from Santos to the bottom of the escarpment, then from the top to Sao Paulo, but were detached for the steep bits. It worked really well.
This would be easy to model in RT3, because there's no locomotive that's easier to model than a locomotive which doesn't exist. Which would be a nice change from obsessively detailing the little mongrels.
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
That way you'd have to run the non-locos up the escarpment, because everything else would be stuck at 1 mph, and you wouldn't run the non-locos anywhere else because they wouldn't have enough top speed. You could still run fully loaded normal locos down the escarpment and get away with it*, but then they'd be stuck on the coast, so you'd need to buy new ones up in the highlands again. That should be a disincentive to "cheating", although no doubt someone would still do it at times if they really needed to.
*Because on a really steep downhill run the boost effect from the descending grade would be enough to get train speed up to useful levels, even with the event greatly reducing pulling power.