A few irritating problems

[enderwiggin]

a couple things are bothering me that i hope you kind folks can answer..

1. is there a way to extend or change (increase) the catchment area for stations? i know about the 'join station' but there is a problem with that....

2. my prob with the join stations is that i have lost track of where my joined bus stations are. i cant actually see them in the towns because thy have blended right in (i build on-road ones). even if i press 'x' to turn transparency on, it makes the stations / bus stations transparent too. anyway i can see where i have placed my bus stations?

3. is there a way to auto replace trains when going from rail to monorail and again to maglev? i can do the normal autoreplace via the manage trains bit, but then it comes to infra changes then i have to do all (often 150 trains and all their orders) manually!!

4. i have a town of only 35k people and one town-wide multilinked 4 bay station. its currently served by 18 trains (each length 7.0) and at any one time i have at least 2 trains loading up. but still the damn ppl waiting increases non-stop... its upto 5k ppl and 2k mail. i cant increase the size or infrastructure any more as the town has grown all around it. i just want to nuke the thing down to the ground and replace by a 20bay ro-ro!! how do u guys handle 100k+ towns??

tks in advance.

[Emperor Jake]

2. my prob with the join stations is that i have lost track of where my joined bus stations are. i cant actually see them in the towns because thy have blended right in (i build on-road ones). even if i press 'x' to turn transparency on, it makes the stations / bus stations transparent too. anyway i can see where i have placed my bus stations?

Press Ctrl-X, you will get a Transparency potions window that can make different things transparent selectively (eg. you can make buildings transparent, but stations remain visible)

3. is there a way to auto replace trains when going from rail to monorail and again to maglev? i can do the normal autoreplace via the manage trains bit, but then it comes to infra changes then i have to do all (often 150 trains and all their orders) manually!!

Don't upgrade to monorail or maglev then. In real life, the regular railways will still be around for hundreds of years, and there are some GRFs that provide futuristic regular-rail trains. Alternately if you prefer the original trains, you can use a Universal Railtype grf.

4. i have a town of only 35k people and one town-wide multilinked 4 bay station. its currently served by 18 trains (each length 7.0) and at any one time i have at least 2 trains loading up. but still the damn ppl waiting increases non-stop... its upto 5k ppl and 2k mail. i cant increase the size or infrastructure any more as the town has grown all around it. i just want to nuke the thing down to the ground and replace by a 20bay ro-ro!! how do u guys handle 100k+ towns??

Once again, NewGRFs can help with that. Use higher capacity trains such as double decker trains for long distances, or S-bahn/metro style trains for short distances. The regular rail carriages hold only 40 passengers, while some double deck trains can hold 80 passengers per cerriage, and metros can hold over 200 passengers per carriage (at teh expense of speed and you need a separate network)

[planetmaker]

2. my prob with the join stations is that i have lost track of where my joined bus stations are. i cant actually see them in the towns because thy have blended right in (i build on-road ones). even if i press 'x' to turn transparency on, it makes the stations / bus stations transparent too. anyway i can see where i have placed my bus stations?

Use ctrl+x to adjust your transparency settings to show what you need to see and what not.

3. is there a way to auto replace trains when going from rail to monorail and again to maglev? i can do the normal autoreplace via the manage trains bit, but then it comes to infra changes then i have to do all (often 150 trains and all their orders) manually!!

The only way I know is, if you have the universal track type added to your game. Learnt to use shared orders, makes it much less than 150 trains. Or keep them and clone the orders (i.e. don't convert the depots, build the new trains in new depots and share orders with the old trains. Only then sell those).

4. (...) how do u guys handle 100k+ towns??

Something like here: http://wiki.openttdcoop.org/PublicServe ... #gameid_96

[enderwiggin]

ahh - emperor jake and planetmaker - many thanks for ctrl+x - didnt know about that.

i usually upgrade to maglev for the increased speed - i have some very long distance lines that would benefit. but i like planetmaker's suggestion.

and tks for the links to the public servers.

any ideas on increasing catchment areas?

edit: emperor jake tks for the extra large carriage ideas. again - didnt know that one!

[Emperor Jake]

any ideas on increasing catchment areas?

You're welcome

Try building feeder services - use small trains, buses or trams to transfer passengers to main stations where long trains will take them to distant places. Use the transfer orders for this. Or, you cna just expand the station catchment not just by building bus stations, but also by using single-tile pieces of stations. For best aesthetic results, use shed or lot non-track tiles that come with many new station sets.

i usually upgrade to maglev for the increased speed - i have some very long distance lines that would benefit. but i like planetmaker's suggestion.

The 2CC trainset provides some quite fast regular high speed trains that also have a high capacity, such as the TGV Duplex.

[enderwiggin]

[/quote]The 2CC trainset provides some quite fast regular high speed trains that also have a high capacity, such as the TGV Duplex.[/quote]

its 1960 and i have the 2cc grf and the set of trains. for the same capacity / speed engines and boxcars are upto x10 the price. why? there are lots of the same types of cars (passenger cars in diff colours all having 40 pax capacity) but very diff prices. and i guess its too early to get double decker or high capacity cars. there are also these funny little 'extender' cars that have a capacity of 1. what are these?

tks for all your suggestions.

in my game i currently have 4 stations all linking towns - each of around 15k ppl. i have about 60 trains going in a big clockwise loop around the world. broadly between stations the trains dont bunch up too much. however at stations its a major problem. often train queues of 4-5 develop (i have 7 lane stations so there is no backlog) . the problem comes from the inevitable bottleneck of using just one line, even if split by lights every square. have i reached the capacity for the lines or are there better ways without having to build 2 / 3 parallel lines around the world?

tks