007 Sudean Transit, OpenTTD
Table of Contents
Overview - 007 Sudean Transit
Thank you for riding with Sudean Transit. At Sudean Transit, we are pleased to offer robust transportation for passengers and mail across the Northwest Peninsula, TillyWind Lake West, and TillyWind Lake East regions.
At Sudean Transit, we offer a variety of transportation services. Between regions, we offer our T-Rapid Regional (R-X##), with our distinctive red Light Rail Vehicles. With three sets of tracks completely separated from traffic, our platoons of vehicles carry you and your mail between sub-regional hubs efficiently. By far our highest capacity offering, we are pleased to offer three lines. We also have a fairly new offering - T-Rapid PeopleLink (S-##), which is similar to T-Rapid Regional but only serves passengers. We only have one line in its vibrant orange color, running on the outskirts of cities in the Northwest Peninsula, but plans exist to build more lines.
Within each region, we offer T-Rapid Local services (L-A/B/C##) and local bus services (B-A/B/C###). Our T-Rapid Local services and buses use a regional identifier for services, with A for the Northwest Peninsula, B for TillyWind Lake West, and C for TillyWind Lake East. Our T-Rapid Local services run completely separated from traffic in trenches, bridges, and tunnels, connecting cities and towns through dense networks and offering premium service. Our feeder buses typically connect multiple T-Rapid Local, Regional, or PeopleLink services.
Design Methodology
The Northwest Peninsula Hub. Eternally congested. Stadtbahn trunk line to the southwest has absolutely zero room for expansion. Once I started PeopleLink, I seriously considered threading an underground bypass line into the hub, or building a line entirely on a viaduct over the water to decongest it.
In direct response to the BRT map's problems, I attempted a similar 'OpenTTD Confederation Line' approach for this map. However, my original intent was to actually design the system as a Stadtbahn with outer sections routing onto local streets and losing their rapid transit alignment in order to be easier to construct. These 'Interurban' sections were all built as full grade separated rapid transit instead. That being said, the new map rules had one glaring issue.
Mail. I did both Mail and Passenger traffic at once. This meant that adding new routes became a repetitive, tedious, and unpleasant experience. I never even planned for PeopleLink until I realized that I really needed it to handle congestion. The end result was a poor combination of bad pathfinding, different mail and passenger vehicle speeds, and all kinds of havoc rendering the entire Stadtbahn system difficult to construct and a pain to expand. The initial interurban approach meant that stations tended to be severely underbuilt, with OpenTTD's own rules on fleet improvement over time meaning that I couldn't add more vehicles to solve problems - after all, adding them now would mean that when they expanded and got faster, the stations would oversaturate due to the heavy interlining. At one point, long mail vehicles backflowed into intersections and prevented passenger trams from entering stations.
Yes, I had a ridiculous passenger capacity on the Regional lines, and in a small space profile. But in the end, if I had fully segregated out lines without nasty 6x6 grand junctions adjacent to stations, I probably would have had an easier time with this map. Even on a map where I never have to upgrade the ROW infrastructure, I've learned to shy away from complex interlining in OpenTTD and build everything the Paris Metro way... just run independent lines with transfer stations...