Multi-008 Suzuka Kōsoku Tetsudō, OpenTTD

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Overview - Multi-008 Suzuka Kōsoku Tetsudō

At Suzuka Kōsoku Tetsudō, we pride ourselves on providing excellent local, suburban, regional, and intercity service to take you wherever you desire to go, all without passengers needing to use a single bus or tram. From your door, we offer suburban and metro services that will take you to your local regional or intercity station, from where the entire network is yours to travel.

As my eighth multiplayer OpenTTD map, Suzuka was a direct successor to the failed Multi-007 attempt, and formed an evolution of its rules. The goals were simple - with one player doing exclusively passenger and mail and the other doing exclusively freight, make use of infrastructure sharing to take advantage of shared narrow gauge standards while also doing a fully integrated network without dedicated tracks for mainlines.

Regarding infrastructure sharing - our first actual attempt - it proved interesting, in that it resulted in heavy congestion and backups at non-grade separated junctions so awful that the idea of using infrastructure sharing between freight and passenger networks now seems laughable - freight networks and passenger networks are built for different purposes. While it made some money to have freight tracks on the passenger network, the resultant traffic and backups (and occasional messed up pathfinding) caused far more chaos than anticipated. This was coupled with the fact that freight traffic rarely goes to viable local stations for towns.

As for the fully integrated network, while the original intention was to fully integrate all regional and intercity services, three other categories were considered separate - metro and rural/connector, and later suburban. In the end the rural/connector category ceased to make any sense as it was just metro for smaller towns, and all lines got upgraded into metro or suburban lines regardless. While it was originally considered that rural and suburban lines could enter mainlines, the signaling layout and space constraints (as well as the capacity hit) were deemed to not be worth it and the idea was abandoned.

It's worth noting that the first high speed services never got built. Suzuka got relegated to a massive terminal city with little traffic assigned to it due to symmetric cargodist, but if the Suzuka-Yamano-Hashiro high speed service had been built, it would have seen a massive shift away from the actual hub of Hitachinaka with its three separate regional and intercity stations.

Overall, this was one of the maps that made tiered system interesting, but the need to use metros for feeders was an awful pain. Note: we later learned that the reason why towns weren't growing was because they couldn't build roads due to a setting from my Vinkelgast map where I disabled it. A lot of grief could have been prevented from this!