Part 2: Vehicle info and financials

You can often see something like this in Locomotion if you bar the computer from buying roads or rail. The early aircraft and ships are hard to make a profit from.


That's tough alright, but I'm willing to take it on. The only exception might be some tunnel portals, although I most of the time I should be able to cut/fill without any problems.

Well they won't be once we're past 1900 model trucks.

Lomo has waypoints, you can just click on the screen while you're setting the vehicle orders to create one.

My usual style is to create an up and down line that are next to or quite close to each other. Usually it's just the two lines, even on quite busy networks. I quite often make stations unidirectional loops as well. I try and keep the footprints of my routes light.


I just checked and yep, exactly as per Veloxyll's post.

Vehicles

I'm going to set one opponent with high intelligence, low aggresiveness and competitiveness, with a start delay of 5 years.

Financially, we're going to start with a loan of $10,000 and a credit limit of $30,000, with 10% interest p/a. This should be enough to just build a single line railway from one side of the map to the other if we avoid excessive engineering.

Here are the vehicles that will be available at the start. There are three predefined vehicle sets available - US, UK and Central Europe. I'm using a customised mixture of each designed to represent what actually operated in NZ but also keeping some of the more outlandish items that never made it down here.

Road:
Unpaved road currently costs $22 a square, the maximum speed is 48km/h. Paved road is $44/square, not speed limit AFAIK. We can also build one-way roads for $44/sq if we want to get into dual carriageways.
Not much choice. For passengers, we only have one type of bus, whose main alternative is a tram car.
WMC Bus:

The WMC is about as good as you'd expect a 1900 vehicle to be. One big advantage of the bus is that we can use existing roads to save on construction. It's quite a good bus for doing the rounds of small towns a bit too far apart for trams.

Various Trucks:


Current trucks aren't very capable and we'll need dozens to hande the output of a single industry. That's not to say that they can't turn a profit, they'll do just fine for short and medium haul jobs.

Rail:
We're still in the railway age, so the serious money at the moment lies in rail.
Tram tracks cost $32/sq, whether over existing roads or new ground.
Rail costs $22/sq.

Ce 2/2 Tram:

This tram is more efficient than the WMC bus, but slower. They'll be able to handle the traffic generated in our largest towns early on.

Special 2-4-2

A good workhorse engine for the early years. Reliable and with a good mix of top speed and power.

US 2-6-2

Our first mod vehicle, so it will always look like this, no matter what the company colours. (I'm thinking of going with filthy coal black steam engines anyway) Ever so slightly more powerful than the Special.

SLM C3/3

A European model thats lighter but less powerful than the others. I held my own little version of Stephenson's locomotive race and it accelerates significantly faster than the others with two light cars but struggles to start with five heavy coaches.

Rail Wagons:



Not much to say here, they'll haul the various types of cargo. Our only choices are in the passenger department, where we have large US style car, or smaller UK style cars that can also carry a little bit of mail. Rail is the best method of long distance passenger transport. [edit:] Can you tell that these are the first GIFs I made? The price of the mail car is $256.

Ships:

Clipper

The clipper can carry 30 passengers, or refit to hold 12 units of mail, food, goods or grapes. We can't carry the other raw materials by sea yet!

Air:
The sky is only good for falling out of hot-air ballons just at the moment.


I did the final tweaks to the scenario tonight, but I'm still open to company suggestions and vehicle names for the next day or two.