Across the Blue Mountains

[Gumboots]

Played this one again, and enjoyed it. I did something a bit different this time. Given that there was no iron or steel production in Australia in this period I deliberately refrained from building steel mills. That naturally meant no chance of getting the steel haulage goal every year (coz no steel at all on the map) which meant I had to rely only on the lumber and wool haulage for bonus track units.

The other changes were my custom cargo cars (as far as they've been done, of course) which meant much longer trains and heavier freights. This adds to congestion, so more difficulty compared to playing with default cargo cars, and consequently lower annual haulage. I also disabled the usual locomotive selection, and was playing with my (slower) custom stats for the Connie and Mogul, so there were no rocket-powered Connies in 1865. I started off with only the Baldwin 0-6-0 for freight and mixed traffic (roughly simulating the actual NSWGR 1 Class 0-4-2 of the time) and the NSWGR Class 5 2-2-2 for express. The Mogul came in 1865, which is roughly analogous to the first trials of Baldwin locos on the NSWGR (although they were 4-4-0's) and I threw in an event to give the Stirling a year later (simulating the T14 class 2-2-2). The Duke and Connie came in 1875. This gave a roster that more closely matched what was actually used in this timeframe, without me having to instantly build and skin a pile of new locos.

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to swing a Gold with this setup, but it turns out I could. Although I just scraped it in, and had to do some rather dodgey things to get there (like a dead straight tunnel all the way from Goulburn to Queanbeyan, to save track units). Having thought about it some more while playing, I think it would be possible to use the same setup but score enough track bonuses so that dodgey things weren't necessary. It'd be tight, but it's probably possible. I might try a few more things with this one as a bit of a challenge.

I did think that really the ports should be coded to do iron and steel as conversions. If you're not building steel mills then coal has no real use, and the market for coal tends to crash pretty badly. An obvious option would be to have a port conversion from coal to iron, and/or wool to iron, along with similar conversions to steel. Coal and wool were export products during the period, and could naturally be exchanged for things that had to be imported. The port would just use whichever was most profitable before 1877, then fall back to the steel conversion from then on (because iron price will crash due to lack of use, so conversion won't be profitable).

[RulerofRails]

Nice. This map could do with an update too, especially some sort of paint-job. If you work out how to make the Steel aspect realistic plus the more realistic loco selection I would be interested in a copy. IIRC, you can disable building the Steel Mill but still have Steel on the map if you add Steel as a cargo to a port/warehouse that is part of at least one cities' seeding recipe.

[Gumboots]

I was thinking about the paint job. I ran a check on the map limits on Google Earth, and it turns out that for correct proportions at that latitude a 448x512 would be perfect. This would give north-south distances 14% greater but east-west would be the same. It only has 36 towns and there aren't many events, so transposing those wouldn't be hard. Come to think of it, some of the events use broken options anyway. The one to haul coal for a reduction in loco fuel cost is a waste of an event, so some minor event tweaking is worth doing.

A few more thoughts: in real life there was no connection between Sydney and Newcastle in this period. That wasn't completed until 1889, and the first step was a line to Hornsby (north Sydney suburb) in 1884. Same for the south coast line. It wasn't even started until 1884. One reason both of these were left so long is that they had to cross pretty gnarly terrain that involved a lot of grades and a lot of tunneling. The difficulty and expense meant other lines were given early priority, with coastal connections north and south being handled by coastal steamers, bullock teams, stagecoaches, etc.

If wanting to clean this one up but keep the feel of the original it would make sense to allow the non-historical connections, but it may be a good idea to increase track costs over the gnarly bits. These connections tend to be left until later in the game, and by that time you're usually making oodles of money anyway. By the end of the game I was holding no bonds at all and still had more money than I knew what to do with. I built two steel mills in 1877 just for the heck of it, once T&D's stopped accepting iron, and even that made hardly any dent in the bank account. I find it's track-limited but not cash-limited, once you are past the earliest years, so a high track cost to get through gnarly bits would be fine. Even an overall track cost increase would be fine if there was an exception for the first five years.

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I wasn't aware that you could disable a building but still have the cargo available at a dock. I think (not completely sure) I tried that but had to enable the actual production building to get the cargo to show up. Will test it again to make sure.

There's an easy workaround anyway. Although both iron and steel had commercial uses during this period, for game purposes they do the same job. The scenario starts in 1855 and steel enters RT3 in 1856, so it would be perfectly feasible to simply no have iron on the map. T&D's can run at a loss for year if they have to (won't hurt anything significant) and the ports can start feeding them steel in 1856. This being contingent on loads being delivered to ports for the conversion to happen, so the missing year of supply probably wouldn't be noticed due to lack of delivery anyway.

If there is no iron on the map, and if steel is coming from ports, nobody will build a steel mill. Simple.

[Gumboots]

Had another thought about this one: the Lithgow Zig Zag. On this map the stretch from Katoomba to Lithgow is a basically horizontal no-brainer. In reality it was a massive undertaking, and when completed was regarded as one of the railway engineering marvels of the time. It used switchbacks to get up the western side of the range, hence the name. I might take a look at what could be done with that concept. It was things like this that made crossing the Blue Mountains such a big deal.

Come to think of it, there was a zig zag section up the east side of the range too.