Underground-only intra-city pax/mail?

[Roland Deepson]

Nooberiffic thread comin atcha!  I recently rediscovered the game, having last played back in 2005-ish when the latest stable build was in the 80s.  I LOVE the evolution!  I'm still hunting for a preferred pakset, and hoping to join an online game soon.  The server-posts by moblet seem enticing, but I'm presuming they're inactive after all this time.

At any rate, my post.

I'm experimenting with undergound-only pax/mail infrastructure within cities, as I left my simulation running for a few hours while I slept and I built up a decent bank of capital to work with.  My idea is to convert to a complete hub-and-spoke system, eliminating all circles and pathing issues.  This may impact travel times, as I'm not sure if layover times are calculated for speed bonuses, and I anticipate that I will reveal numerous flaws within my own plan.  I hope to keep before-during-after savegames allowing others to help me determine outcomes and identify flaws (though I'm not sure how bext to post them publicly.)

Prior to this decision, I've designed organic, demand-based ad hoc pax lines that consist of loops and line routes within cities at 0% load thresholds, but the ebb and flow of pax demand is maddening.  As a result of low carriage densities, my local mail / pax loops tend to run heavily in the red.  However, I do daisy-chain intercity runs.  All cities get a "{cityname} Terminus" station plopped at the edge of the initial urban footprint, such that city expansion will eventually envlope the stop and it becomes central.  I always load origin-leg intercity runs at 100% threshold, so these runs tend to run consistent profits for me.  However, as this is daisy chain and not hub/spoke, backlogs and crowding is difficult to contend with, particularly with the local runs that are designed to feed the intercity Terminus-to-Terminus runs.  I anticipate that true local hub/spoke within cities, and at regional road hubs between cities (eventually encompassing an entire map with perhaps 4-10 major rail hubs of 5-12 cities each, as I have not yet decided on a map or even a mapsize) will generate "lower" profits, but that these profits will be sustainable and reliable.

With underground in-city construction, I can place all runs with 100%'s at the hubs and Terminuses (Terminii?), adding stops as cities sprawl and replacing vehicles for higher capacity on individual routes -- my own professional experience with real world logistics and freight / pax distribution leads me to guess that no single spoke in this setup will require more than two vehicles, one for pax and one for mail.  With consistent outbound 100% loads, my deadhead mileage costs will be as minimized as the game mechanic allows.  Potential problems will likely result from having to keep track of so many line schedules, however.  Isn't the limit 8000?  We'll see, as I don't intend to lose focus on friehgt as well.

My hope is that, once fleshed, I can investigate the possibility of driving freight infrastructure undergound within cities as well.  Even underground, this will still leave me within the 50kph speed limitations of city driving, but should nevertheless all but eliminate topside congestion issues that are so notorious (particularly impacting freight profits.)  Again, I'm not so much anticipating monstrous profits as I am anticipating consistency and stability within those profit margins, aiming to reduce or eliminate the boom/bust cycles.  With underground construction, I can also assure little to possibly no station coverage overlaps or gaps and without relying on artificial extensions, which I find annoying to implement.  As queues increase, I'll simply replace these single vehicles with larger capacity ones (with an eye toward low mileage operating costs, and disregarding speed as I'll be restricted to 50kph) instead of adding further vehicles to any given line, and instead of expanding tile coverage in the stop -- though I wouldn't be against upgrading the plot tiles themselves if the need arose.

One likely downfall to this idea I have, however, is that my maintenance costs could possibly become unsustainable, though I cannot confirm this without experimenting.

Ideas, feedback, or thoughts would be appreciated.  Of particular interest is in knowing how to change elevation or go multilevel within underground, as my understanding of that part of the interface is poor (underground wasn't an option the last time I played, though I do know that you START underground by ctrl+clicking the opening of a tunnel.)

[VS]

You can use slope tools on end of tunnel (not entrance, but underground end).