Hawk & Badger Railroad

The Caboose

So, you think just because it's a 3D engine and the track doesn't contour the land anymore that you can't stitch track or anything to lower hills? No so. All of the buildings need a level place to be built. They will contour the land either by raising it or lowering it. Only they are too expensive to be used as earthmoving machines. Come the lowly Post Office. The cheapest free building you can buy is a marvel at lowering (or on a bad hair day raising) land and track. The one thing a building won't do is raise or lower another building. If you come up to a building that is next to some track that is raised by another building you will be presented with a cliff of some sort between the two levels. Bulldoze one or both and try again.

The Post Office costs $1,000 a year of maintenance and $5,000 to bulldoze. One of the problems some people claim with the game is there is too much land contouring. This happens when buildings or stations are placed. The track and the land can be drastically altered, often causing the track to rise steeply. This however doesn't seem to bother the train much. Maybe there's a lot of momentum that carries the train up the steep grade.

Here several Post Offices were used to lower a rather nasty hill the AI railroad laid track over. Once it was taken over, I needed to improve train speed and lowered the hill.

Leaping Trains

Image courtesy of Bob Ellis

It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a train. A train was on that track section when the game was paused and the post offices did their work.
BTW, no trains were harmed in the making of this image.

More Weirdness

Images courtesy of Lars (Lama) Maischak