Too many elevated tracks

[orville]

The idea of having bridges that can be built on more than one level is a good idea but the problem now is it is just far too easy to build your entire track or road above ground to save time. This is what all the AI opponents are doing. They even built bridges across vast spans of ocean to connect up with distant islands.

All these elevated tracks give the impression in some areas of the map of a big fat spaghetti bowl!

A possible solution to the problem when a fourth coming patch is released, is to limit the amount of squares a player can build an elevated route when passing through a local authority. Some local authorises for instance, could by quite hostile in this area in the name of visual pollution!

After all, in the real world, we would not see elevated tracks running for miles through the countryside…

[Steve]

Yes we would. Well.. sometimes.

Bridges are expensive though. I tried to make a nice suspension bridge across a big lake. It cost A LOT of money, i needed a good lumber route to supply me with funds.

[ampz]

My suggestion for a solution to the unrealistic high amount of weird bridges is to put a much more strict height limit on the stone bridge. The stone bridge also happens to be extremely ugly when elevated higher than two levels.
After all, in reality, I doubt that type of stone bridges can be built very high compared to the steel bridges.

In reality, it is extremely hard to turn or elevate a high bridge, beacuse slopes and turns adds large amounts of horizontal stress to the bridge, and most types of bridges can only handle vertical stress.

If it becomes very hard and/or expensive to put a turn or slope to a high bridge, then I think the spaghettifactor will decrease...

EDIT

I built a cuple (dual track) of suspension bridges from a alpine ski center to a big city at sea level. The station in the city was at alpine height

It would be really cool if it were extremely hard and/or expensive to build long/high elevated bridges for normal railway (but with a limited low cost alternative, like a the wooden bridge). But later on you get monorail-style maglev technology (transrapid style) and with that technology it becomes a bit easier to build elevated tracks.
Countrary to elevated rail-on-track, elevated monorail-style maglev looks good.

[Korenn]

just monorail would look great too.