Iron Horse 2.21.0 now on Bananas!
This is an extra special BAD FEATURE release adding...Restaurant Cars
Some notes after the changelog also.
2.21.0 Release
Changes
- added Restaurant Cars
- adding a Restaurant Car to a train will provide a bonus: improved run costs and payment rates for all Passenger Coaches and Luxury Passenger Coaches in the train
- the bonus reduces run costs for those coaches by 70%
- the bonus increases cargo aging rate for those coaches by 30%
- the bonus is applied once only per train, adding more than one Restaurant Car will have no additional effect
- the bonus applies only to Passenger Coaches and Luxury Passenger Coaches, not railcars, high-speed trains, mail vans etc
- the bonus can significantly improve profits on some routes, but Restaurant Cars are expensive to buy and run...it's up to you to decide if they're worth it
- rebalanced Passenger Coach and Luxury Passenger Coach purchase and run costs
- simplified cargo aging for passenger vehicles
- Passenger Coaches are unchanged, with faster carging (roughly every 0.75 days)
- Metro trains are unchanged, with very fast cargo aging (roughly every 0.47 days)
- all other passenger vehicles now use the same standard value for cargo aging (every 2.5 days), where some previously had slower aging rates
- this change simplifies balancing between passenger vehicles (and makes maintenance of the grf easier)
- gameplay effect of this change should be negligible in most games
- renamed Luxury Railcars to Express Railcars
- minor tweaks to purchase costs of Express Railcars, Express Railcar Trailers and Railcar Trailers
- improved appearance of Blackthorn and Stentor engines
Some things I found from testing Restaurant Cars...
1. Effect is very variable depending on route length, train length, train speed, loading factor (% of train capacity used on average) etc
2. Less effective on short trains (less than 4 coaches or so as a rough guide)
3. More beneficial with Passenger Coaches than Luxury Passenger Coaches
4. More beneficial on longer routes (use 64 tiles as a rough guide, but it's a very rough measure)
5. Less effective on long routes as trains get faster (very helpful on 75mph trains, less so on 125mph trains)
6. Might be very beneficial on trains that don't run fully loaded all the time
7. Work better when you have room to add the restaurant car as extra, instead of having to replace one pax coach when stations are short
So, let's do some science making trains and find out where they're most useful, profitable, valuable!
Or just add them because you like them.