What is the advantage of Trams?

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DeletedUser10
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What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

In OTTD, there are some tram newgrfs.
You know, trams are more expensive and slower than Road Vehicles, and even less profitable than trains.

So, what is the good point of trams? Are they just eye-candy?
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Gwyd
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Gwyd »

They are good for routes where you'd find buses, but buses are too small. Also, iirc, you can couple some trams together. Lots of capacity!
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

I think use one way road and road vehicles could do the same thing.
Furthermore, trams are much too slow.

I can't find a fast tram set anyway, trams are always travel below 100km/h.
So I think trams are pretty useless, what do you think?
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Pilot »

ir1n1o57 wrote:I think use one way road and road vehicles could do the same thing.
Furthermore, trams are much too slow.

I can't find a fast tram set anyway, trams are always travel below 100km/h.
So I think trams are pretty useless, what do you think?
Trams are good for inner-city transportation, where buses would clog up roads easily, and would likely not get up to very high speeds anyway (stops close together, lots of turns, etc.). Furthermore, I've not seen a single bus that can carry 300 passengers, where as (some) trams do.

Remember, sometimes it's not the speed that counts, but in fact the amount of people you transport :wink:
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Alberth »

I used trams for collecting and distributing cargoes between clusters of farms. RVs don't have enough capacity, and trains need too much space.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

My 100th post.

I found that the fastest tram is in the 2cc tram set, 110km/h, but ONLY carry pax
Is there any fast cargo tram sets there?
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Auge »

Hello
ir1n1o57 wrote:I found that the fastest tram is in the 2cc tram set, 110km/h, ...
110km/h, WTF?? In another thread you propose a more realistic (but IMHO play-mechanics-wise non-desirable) way to handle vehicle crashes and now you want's to have unrealistic high speed trams? Do such fast trams exists in reality? And if yes, how common they are?

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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by leifbk »

ir1n1o57 wrote:I found that the fastest tram is in the 2cc tram set, 110km/h, but ONLY carry pax
Is there any fast cargo tram sets there?
What's the hurry? ;)

Speed isn't everything in this game. It's at least equally important to provide a reliable, regular service, keeping customers happy. You can actually make money even in the 18th century with sail ships and horse carts going at 20 km/h.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Sylf »

If you want a faster tram, you can build one of your own.
Zoom zoom, 300km/h trams. Pax, cars, outta my way!
WHooooosh, 500km/h trams on dedicated tracks! oh, wait, that's called JR maglev :lol:
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by andythenorth »

For towns, capacity-per-tile is usually more important than vehicle speed.

The trams in Road Hog should easily outperform the buses in Road Hog for towns with high passenger numbers.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by SilverSurferZzZ »

The fastest, and invented, tram in OTTD It's in Racing Cars (limited by the max OTTD speed).
With a single turn on/off in his parameters window, ideal for all type of players (reality lovers or haters).

And, by the other hand, for real and slow trams...
The Peak Tram (in Cars Cars), has a slow speed but is a perfect tram to climb really steep slopes.

Every vehicle, and even, game style, has his own particularities; In other words, speed is good, but sometimes you need other things.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Redirect Left »

One thing I hate about Bobs tram set, the loading on it so slow, I find it slow to the point of cash wasting.

Shame there isn't some sort of normalisation implemented between GRFs, so they don't all stray too far from each other, would help regular and new players alike not accidentally screw themselves over with GRFs.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

In OpenTTD, the SH8P steam engine that available in 1960s could run in 144km/h, but trams that available on 1960s could only up to 60km/h.

Trains and trams are both using iron rail, why the speed is so different?
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

Auge wrote:Hello
ir1n1o57 wrote:I found that the fastest tram is in the 2cc tram set, 110km/h, ...
110km/h, WTF?? In another thread you propose a more realistic (but IMHO play-mechanics-wise non-desirable) way to handle vehicle crashes and now you want's to have unrealistic high speed trams? Do such fast trams exists in reality? And if yes, how common they are?

Tschö, Auge
I'm Not asking for that unrealistic speed.
Maybe 120-130km/h is profitable and quite Not so unrealistic.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Pilot »

ir1n1o57 wrote:Trains and trams are both using iron rail, why the speed is so different?
Because, in reality, they are both designed for entirely different roles, and therefore, trams don't need to be fast. As has been said, if used in a realistic manner, a tram will not get up to it's top speed, so why does it matter if your tram has a top speed of 80km/h or 120km/h?

That being said, I've been on a tram doing 50 mph (about 80km/h) and the whole thing sounded like it wanted to rattle itself apart! In fact, it got so bad that trams are now restricted on that section, so obviously running at high speeds isn't good for them.
ir1n1o57 wrote:Maybe 120-130km/h is profitable and quite Not so unrealistic.
You can make a profit with a tram that does 80km/h, damn, you can make a profit with the horse drawn carts from eGRVTS and they do about 10 km/h!

---

Also, slightly unrelated, may I suggest you have a look at the Forum Rules, particularly rule 1c about double posting. After all, there is no need for you to create 2 posts about very similar things 2 mins apart in the same topic, you can do as I have done above and answer both in the same post.

Now, I'm going to look at the post about Backseat Moderating :mrgreen:
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Auge »

Hello
ir1n1o57 wrote:In OpenTTD, the SH8P steam engine that available in 1960s could run in 144km/h, but trams that available on 1960s could only up to 60km/h.
In the 1940s locomotives with a speed of 160km/h and trams with a regular speed of 70km/h was available and nowadays we know locomotives/MU with far more than 300km/h in regular service and the trams still runs with 70km/h (or less).
ir1n1o57 wrote:Trains and trams are both using iron rail, why the speed is so different?
It's because of their different use cases. One on a separate rail system and the other in urban street traffic.
ir1n1o57 wrote:I'm Not asking for that unrealistic speed.
Maybe 120-130km/h is profitable and quite Not so unrealistic.
A tram with a speed of 120km/h is unrealistic. The lemma about the Dresdener Großer Hecht in the german Wikpedia says, that this type from the late 1920s holds the official world record of 98km/h for tram speed until today.

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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by DeletedUser10 »

Pilot wrote:
ir1n1o57 wrote:Trains and trams are both using iron rail, why the speed is so different?
Because, in reality, they are both designed for entirely different roles, and therefore, trams don't need to be fast. As has been said, if used in a realistic manner, a tram will not get up to it's top speed, so why does it matter if your tram has a top speed of 80km/h or 120km/h?

That being said, I've been on a tram doing 50 mph (about 80km/h) and the whole thing sounded like it wanted to rattle itself apart! In fact, it got so bad that trams are now restricted on that section, so obviously running at high speeds isn't good for them.
ir1n1o57 wrote:Maybe 120-130km/h is profitable and quite Not so unrealistic.
You can make a profit with a tram that does 80km/h, damn, you can make a profit with the horse drawn carts from eGRVTS and they do about 10 km/h!

---

Also, slightly unrelated, may I suggest you have a look at the Forum Rules, particularly rule 1c about double posting. After all, there is no need for you to create 2 posts about very similar things 2 mins apart in the same topic, you can do as I have done above and answer both in the same post.

Now, I'm going to look at the post about Backseat Moderating :mrgreen:

I'm sorry for my double post.
It was happened because my computer was too slow and I was in hurry.
I won't do that again.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by kamnet »

In OpenTTD, you can certainly create a tram that goes 400 km/h. (or whatever the top limit for road vehicles are). As demonstrated by SilverSurferZZZ's set, they're out there. The reason why other tram set authors don't do this is because they're creating historical sets that are meant to be accurate in their modeling and specs based on real-world vehicles, and in reality trams just don't travel that fast.

I imagine now that we have NRT out t here and a few coders and authors working on it, we might see one or two sets which use it to create a new fictional high-speed tram. Of course, that won't be playable unless you're using the forked version of OpenTTD with NRT enabled (at least until it's merged back into the main OpenTTD source code, but that might be years away still).
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by Sylf »

ir1n1o57 wrote:I'm Not asking for that unrealistic speed.
Maybe 120-130km/h is profitable and quite Not so unrealistic.
120km/h is extremely unrealistic for trams/street cars. One of the advantage of steel rail/steel wheel transportation is the lack of friction between them which leads to greater energy efficiency. But that also means bad acceleration and braking capability, which is vital when you need to operate on streets. Many trams I know have maximum operating speed of 40km/h. Designed operating speed hardly ever exceed 60km/h, although such speed is almost never used on streets. Such trains like Hiroshima tram, or Keihan trains (which you use for your avatar) may have higher maximum designed and operating speed, but those speeds are used for off-the-road sections. If you want trains that runs 60km/h or faster, you certainly need a dedicated rail, not rails on streets. 120km/h? That's completely insane for trams.
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Re: What is the advantage of Trams?

Post by planetmaker »

Most cities with a reasonable tram network here in Germany have at least in the outer city parts dedicated tracks for their trams. There they easily exceed speeds of 50km/h or so. From one place I can guestimate: it is like 70km/h...100km/h for sure as they pass the cars on the parallel road which has (or rather had when I lived there) a sign-posted speed limit of 70km/h.

Thus if you operate some trams more like s-bahn, not stopping every kilometer, a speed of 120km/h is not completely out of the world.

Anecdotical side note: trams have two braking systems here: one normal which operates like normal brakes on the wheels. And they have an emergency system which is like lowering a bar to the tracks - which creates A LOT of friction. Thus once the driver said "ladies and gentlemen, please be advised that the primary breaks of this tram are faulty, we will break rather abruptly. Please make sure you either sit or got a firm stand and grip on the rails". People laughed at that. Until it used the break...
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