First off I will say that maybe I'm going to give spoilers. If you haven't played the map yet, be warned.
I decided to do something different here and started out by maxing bonds in order to buy the 3 Coal Mines for about $3.2M each. This was to prevent any of them from disappearing as they had done in previous plays. The economy Boomed early and I re-financed everything down to 2% interest.
I played with the 1.06 exe with
price islands restored. The result was the medal took a year longer than last time. Last time I felt on the replay I could have gone a year or two faster on the second phase (had $27.9M revenue in 2027 then $29.5M in 2028 before finally jumping over $30M in 2029), so there could be 3 years in it. Please bear in mind that this wasn't a controlled test, didn't follow exactly same strategy, economy was better generally in my latest play. Also, please be advised that this is simply about how the modified exe performs in a no-industry, high haulage, low revenue (pre-built network with almost all existing stations 20+ years old) environment. The scenario is very well designed with a fail safe so not mission critical.
What I did this time in the 3rd phase was to build my own Electric Plants outside the cities so that I could let trains run over most of the map on Auto Consist. I wanted to put 4 on a cell south Sinuiji and just ship the Chinese Coal and Oil there (skimmed a little Oil for Musan). In the process I discovered a
bug in the game. But went back to a save and built all four on a cell successfully. Musan was the only city where I operated Electric Plants within city limits.
Something that puzzles me is that the Musan plants produced about more electricity per load delivered, with much better profits, as an example in 2028, 9.2 loads was used to produce 438.3GWh at a profit of $398k. One of the ones I built: $53k profit, 8.5 loads consumed to produce 253.7GWh. This is a mystery. In my previous game the Musan plants weren't more efficient. I'm not going to speculate on the reason, just keep it in the back of my mind in case I observe something else while playing in the future. Mentioned it in case someone else notices.
These are the type of bridge abutments that I mentioned
over here. The train passes through them fine. It's impossible to bulldoze them.
I never tried to build a bridge exactly there, as access to China comes much later in the game. So must be more of a bug. Who knows, maybe they appeared one time I pushed "Electrify all non-electric track." Was building non-electric and then hitting the button to try to keep the pylon placements neater, as you can see that double-tracking hurts the look in the end anyway. But, I stress that I never actually observed them appear so this is pure speculation.
Interesting fact from wiki:
In 2006, 240,000 km (150,000 mi) (25% by length) of the world rail network was electrified and 50% of all rail transport was carried by electric traction.
I'll let Oilcan answer more.
