![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
So I'm making a Schools class choofer, just for the fun of it, and that eventually got me into thinking about how it could be used. After looking around a bit and pondering the situation, I realised that it's really a bit of an orphan at the moment. It could be used in umpteen scenarios, but doesn't have a special place as things stand.
An obvious solution is to make a specifically Southern Railway scenario, which has quite a bit of scope for being interesting. The grouping of smaller railways was in 1923, and BR nationalisation was in 1948. This means Southern itself was in existence for 25 years, the standard RT3 scenario length, and that period spanned everything from the Roaring Twenties, to the '29 crash and Great Depression, followed by economic recovery, followed again by that stupid war some silly people wanted to start. This means there are plenty of possible events to throw into the mix, and cargo targets can be changed for some years to add some extra strategy.
The other thing is that Southern was unusual among UK railways, in that around 75% of its income in non-war years was from passenger cargo. This changed to about 60% freight in some war years, but for most of the time Southern was very heavily reliant on express. This means the scenario should be coded to reflect that, and a scenario that heavily emphasises pax haulage is unusual anyway. Unusual is good, since it would take the emphasis off industry and require a different playing style. People often wonder about how to maximise pax haulage, and this might be a good way to find out. The intention here is to have at least one un-mergeable AI railway (GWR and SR shared some of the same territory and lines) and have a requirement that SR ends up with more loot, which it will have to get from massive pax haulage while GWR will have access to heavy industry as well.
Problem: RT3's editor is, once again, letting us down with its range of options. It has heaps of useless options that nobody ever wants, but lacks some really good ones. You can get industry profit in event conditions, but there is no way you can get express revenue or freight revenue. This is a bummer because I was initially thinking of having a pax revenue target. Pax loads is useless since that can be baited and switched if anyone wants to. Revenue can't be cheated, but also can't be coded.
![Rolling Eyes :roll:](./images/smilies/icon_rolleyes.gif)
Looks like the only way of doing it is to use territories, with heavy passenger production and limited industry in the areas Southern has access to. This is a crude substitute but should be workable.
So this is all looking promising as a scenario basis, then I got to thinking of other stuff. Southern also owned hotels, ports, and ships as part of its business empire. Hotels are a no brainer. Ports can be user-built or pre-placed. What about ships? This is when I vaguely remembered something about the British Miracle map, which I've never played, having "steamship lines" in it. I downloaded that map and took a look at it, and the "steamship lines" are just ordinary tracks and trains running across blue-painted zero-altitude land bridges through the ocean.
This is a cute idea. OTOH I don't like it. It looks daft to me to have tracks and trains running over the ocean. I couldn't put up with that myself, and was a bit disgruntled about it all. Then I realised something: it's just a skinning problem. As long as you only want steam trains (like me) there will be the modelling for electric track sitting around unused. The actual track model is the same for all track, with the difference being the catenary model for the flying fusebox tracks. Obviously a custom catenary model could be made and dropped into UEC. This could then be skinned to cover the tracks with nice ocean waves or whatever, but for game purposes would still be "electric track".
So, if territories are set up so that electric track is only affordable across the ocean, then you can have a rail network full of steam locos and your electric locos will be limited to the oceans. To stop idiots running choofers across oceans, similar territory tricks could be used to nobble oceanic choofers so they would be far too slow and unreliable to bother with, with the result that people would only use "electric locos" for crossing water. The obvious trick here is to skin an "electric loco" as a, you guessed it, steamship. This can have speed, hauling power, cost, whatever, tweaked to something suitable. For example, it could chew masses of fuel and be expensive to buy, but haul masses of stuff with perfect reliability and low maintenance costs, along with great pax appeal.
Ok, so if that's a possibility, how to handle stations? Again, just a skinning problem. There's no reason why one unused architectural style couldn't be co-opted to give stations that look like steamship ports. If only using Victorian, Tudor and (possibly) Clapboard station styles for a UK scenario, that leaves the Kyoto and Southwest styles up for grabs. So, just skin them up as ports and set the architectural style to suit for your steamship territories.
![thumbs_up !*th_up*!](./images/smilies/ok.gif)
So, we could, within the limitation of no electric locos on land, get steamship lines that look like steamship lines.
![cheers (0!!0)](./images/smilies/cheers.gif)