015 North Sea Electric, OpenTTD

Table of Contents

Overview - 015 North Sea Electric

Thank you for riding with the North Sea Electric Railway, where our network of railways connects directly to every town and city center with dedicated tram lines. In addition, we once again thank you for your patronage on our brand new Shinkansen Line, and welcome passengers switching from our conventional limited express services.

Design Methodology

After two maps of considering the idea, it has finally come to fruition - an ACTUAL interconnected national railway network with both section running locals and through running services, and with every town tailor-designed into a 3x3 grid with a single directional tram loop around the city center to maximize town growth and capture close to 100% of all buildings within the transit catchment area.

The conventional network was designed with a fairly rigid standard for station format based around the 3x3 grid, and was centered around one main station with through and terminating platforms - every later section terminus city also had through and terminating platforms controlled by waypoints. The intention was to begin running limited express services that ran through services, and this time it actually happened, unlike on prior maps.

The theme chosen for the conventional limited express was fish, with the Shinkansen using birds.

In order to facilitate limited express services, many stations were built with through tracks along the middle, using one grade separated bypass and one at-grade bypass. This design worked... except at one particular junction station (*cough* Hamachi *cough*) where there just wasn't enough space. But that aside, I think things worked well.

The center of the network was Nagatani, a city of only moderate importance given that the regional metro line I built to allow it to expand kinda didn't serve its main station. But once the Shinkansen began service (as did the Penguin, running along the middle of what was planned to be two north-south main lines that never materialized due to my focus on lateral expansion), it became a true hub.

West of Nagatani was Takarazuka, a city that bore witness to the first branch line (which later ended up being converted to a full metro service independent of the main network) and which ended up being a perpetual mess of congestion due to all trains stopping. Once the Hōfuku Line opened as a bypass and had its own platforms, that alleviated congestion quite a bit. The southern area was redeveloped with plans for the high speed station, though this section caused the entire metro service to run at a perpetual loss until the high speed line actually opened.

Further west of Takarazuka was Fukushima, the other end of the Hōfuku Line (though of course it hadn't yet been planned when I reached the city). It only contains a moderately infuriating junction, but I ended up not expanding the city much, resulting in limited ridership.

The Hokkai East Line was a problem child, mainly due to the line passing through mountainous towns, and due to my insistence on building a junction to the Kurashiki area later on. Originally, I didn't have limited expresses stop at towns, but Hamachi... once it became a junction, a stop became inevitable. And overcrowding too became inevitable. It was the only town that ended up with so many platforms (and bulldozing a chunk of a mountain to fit more). The original Hinto Line local terminating platforms had to be relocated in order to fit more platforms on the through track, hence why they look sort of funny. In the end, when I built the high speed line, I bulldozed more than a few additional mountains, however. And yes, the Higashi Hamachi section was added later, with the tracks under and through the town (you can see the tracks right next to HMC 7) being the original alignment, intended exclusively for through service before I realized that running the locals all the way to Nagatani would be a throughput disaster.

Of course, there were other hubs, with the Kurashiki region in the southeast being a group of cities that I spent a lot of time building a dedicated loop line for.

Still, as a newer region, it never got its high speed line as I hadn't expanded further out enough - if I began service on the constructed high speed line, it would have immediately cannibalized and decimated ridership from the conventional limited express. So in the end, it remained an underdeveloped area.

All in all, this was quite the map, and a pretty good run.