Convert railway support for monorail/maglev

[adras]

Right now it's only possible to upgrade from normal rails to electrified. Doing an upgrade to monorail/maglev is really cumbersome.

How difficult would it be to implement support for that?

[kamnet]

It's supposed to be cumbersome. Electrifying a rail line is fairly straight forward. Replacing a rail line with monorail is literally replacing every piece of infrastructure, every vehicle, etc.

But NewGRFs have that problem solved already. Look at the Progressive Rail set.

[Argus]

It even works with Nutracks, I think it works with most rail sets.

[adras]

Seems like my question wasn't precise enough. One can already upgrade entire track networks using "Convert/upgrade type of rail". However this excludes depots (with trains inside). If depots were included, I could follow up the conversion by using "Mange List/Replace vehicles"

Edit: I just played around with "Progressive rail". I have actually no idea what it does. I just created a monorail train on a small track. Then I converted to maglev, but the track piece the train was on, wasn't converted (but it's supposed to as far as I understood the description)

[Eddi]

there are various GRFs providing a "universal railtype", so the procedure roughly looks like this:

1. send all monorail vehicles to depot
2. convert all depots to universal railtype
3. autoreplace the monorail vehicles to maglev vehicles
4. convert the network to maglev
5. let all vehicles leave

[al78]

I have found that when playing scenarios, the universal rail type grf cannot be incorporated so the tedium of manually replacing all the vehicles and rail is unavoidable.

[Emperor Jake]

I have found that when playing scenarios, the universal rail type grf cannot be incorporated so the tedium of manually replacing all the vehicles and rail is unavoidable.

It is possible to add GRFs to a scenario, see here for details: viewtopic.php?t=90609

Yes, there are warnings against it, but adding the Progressive Rail/Universal Railtype to an otherwise mostly-vanilla scenario should be reasonably safe. Always backup and test though

[betadd]

Could someone give an explanation, why it is supposed to be hard?
I mean the hard part is not replacing the tracks (that is just a single drop of an area), but keeping the orders of the involved trains on the network.

If you have less than 100 groups with different orders by the time you switch rails, it's doable, but this just means the game just ends at some point, because the difficult part of this game is not building tracks or whatever, but managing train orders.

The Universal Railtype feels hacky. It allows more than should be allowed. (I could even do the replacement with rolling cargo.) And it's impossible to spot a missing tile, because of the non existent artwork. It also feels like a deliberate cheat in general.

Why can't we just have a menu to choose the replacement for a train when upgrading the depot instead of throwing an error?