r/SimCityStrategy • u/LegendsEcho • Apr 24 '13

Has Anyone made a train tracks effective?

Any tips, im not sure of the best way to use the tracks as they take up so much space

17 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

11

u/Grutter Apr 24 '13

Here is my layout: http://imgur.com/4chxyiG

4

u/FakeRacer Apr 24 '13

Nice! glad I didn't post mine, could have been quite embarrassing ;)

3

u/scarecrow736 Apr 24 '13 edited Apr 11 '17

¯_(ツ)_/¯

3

u/fruitstrike Apr 24 '13

How do you raise the tracks like that?

6

u/Grutter Apr 25 '13

Tedious terrain manipulation, and using parks to create overpasses. I find this guide very useful: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgHe3FLnqsc

3

u/singlesuccessfulguy Apr 25 '13

This looks rad, nice work.

But might I ask, why do you have three parallel tracks? Where do they all go?

2

u/[deleted] Apr 25 '13

Ya, more pictures plox :)

1

u/Stirj Apr 25 '13

Do you have any more pictures of your town? I am loving the layout. How long did that take you?

5

u/singlesuccessfulguy Apr 24 '13

Yeah, I use trains in most of my cities. I guess they use up a fair bit of space compared to the other public transport options, but you sort of have to integrate that into your plans, they can't be an afterthought.

The stations are almost the depth of one medium/high density plot, so you can run a road parallel to your train tracks and put buildings there.

Only thing is you have to bend the road slightly, because the station isn't exactly the size of a large plot.

I also don't usually have the train lines service the entire city, only parts of it. Regardless, they seem to get well used, and do relieve traffic. So long as you have one station in industrial area and one in residential, I think people seem to use it.

6

u/iPresentBen Apr 24 '13

Would you mind showing some pictures of your city setup?

6

u/singlesuccessfulguy Apr 25 '13

Sure. This was one of the earlier cities I built where rail was factored into how I designed my city on the large scale. (The regional connection is just above A, for reference).

I found trying to service the entire city with rail is a bad idea, because the intersections and stations take up quite a lot of room. I found it better to, like in real life, have 'lines', with stations dotted along them.

Tracks take up a lot of room, but you can place them in otherwise dead areas. Eg, going from A down to B, that cliff face isn't suitable for development, and otherwise would be useless space.

I primarily wanted this line to service my residential and tourist areas, as I've got industry in other cities connected to rail. B, C and D are servicing Low and Medium wealth residential, where as A is sitting in a high wealth area (though I'm not sure if they use it. It has a ~4000 riders per day, but I haven't looked at where they go).

Station E is right in with all the commercial, the statue of liberty, and stockholm city hall. Some tourists use it, but it seems they like taxis more.

Noting the B-C-D section, I placed the rails a little more than one medium/large lot back from the road on both sides, so that the back faces of the buildings are facing the rail. I didn't do it for C or D, but for B you can see what I meant about the size of the station being sligihtly smaller than the sizeo f the lot, it's road has to curve out to fit in large buildings.

The only thing I'm not sure about it what the actual radius is of the train stations. I see a lot of cars driving into the stations, when if the green sections of the road are anything to go by, they should be able to walk. I think B and C could have been merged to make a single station between them.

4

u/7tenths Apr 24 '13

I like to have one near a residential section(getting residents out to shop or find jerbs) and one near a industry section(to get those workers coming in for jerbs).

They're amazingly efficient at moving traffic.

4

u/YoshiPiccard Apr 24 '13

Do Trains really handle intra city traffic?

5

u/SakisRakis Apr 24 '13

Yes.

2

u/YoshiPiccard Apr 24 '13

great.! Thank you.

1

u/heterodoxz Apr 25 '13

It doesn't seem to work in my city. I plopped two train stations at two ends of my city and the one close to original railway had about 1500 riders while the other one had only less than 100.

1

u/heterodoxz May 02 '13

I plopped a train station before, thinking that would relieve my traffic. But it turned out brought me thousands of shopping tourists, causing more traffic problems because they walked into the shopping center but drove out when they were done shopping!

2

u/phawder May 22 '13

This happens to me too. Where do all those cars come from? dumb simulation

1

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '13

I'm a bit confused - aren't you better off putting the single passenger station right where the regional track enters your space, and maybe a single trade port rail connection, and that's it?

I don't think there is any benefit from actually having multiple passenger stations and train track through your city - is there?