“The inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard and the dwellers on the Pacific slopes are no longer separated as distinct peoples, they are henceforth members of the same great family, united by great principles and general interests.”
Railroads were the cornerstone of the development of the interior of the United States. In the same way that the stone roads of Rome united that empire, the steel roads of Vanderbilt, Harriman, Stanford and Gould united ours. I think of railroads as the first internet, and these individuals as the previous generation of great (or terrible) entrepreneurs. Someday the names of Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk will be viewed in the same light.
I have always been fascinated by railroads. The mechanical complexity of a steam locomotive is astonishing. It’s a miracle they ever worked at all. The amount of human coordination required to plan, construct, maintain, and operate a railroad was unbelievable.
I used to do model railroads, and that was a lot of fun; I learned a lot about electricity and practical engineering. Unfortunately, they’re expensive, so now I play Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe instead. It’s a great open-source project building the world’s most accurate transportation simulator. The graphics could be better, but the graphics don’t matter. I have designed and published three (as of November 2019) different scenarios for this game. They’re available ingame via the BaNaNas package manager. I’m currently working on my fourth. The published ones are:
Dib’s Tigard Transcontinental: A mountains-to-the-sea scenario vaguely reminiscent of east coast coal country, something like Pennsylvania or West Virginia. The town names are drawn mostly from Oregon, because Oregonians have cool town names. This is a challenging scenario with a lot of tight spaces and all of your resource flows will be concentrated through narrow choke points.
Dib’s Motherlode: This scenario is all about finding the best path over an absolutely brutal mountain range. You start on the coast, and there’s a huge diamond mine a hundred miles inland, but you have to get those diamonds out somehow. At the start you don’t have enough money to even come close to finishing the line over the pass, so you have to start smaller, creating shorter links around Port St. Mary before building the big one. This one is vaguely british-african-colony themed, and it turns out to be really challenging to use British style to solve this problem. The trains are too short and the engines are not powerful enough; the lines become crowded very quickly. If I had to do this again I’d be curious to make it with American equipment, which is really good for this sort of long-heavy-haul problem.
Dib’s Untamed West: This is a wild-west sort of map. It features a big mountain pass as its main focus, with a long circuitous alternative flat route to the south. This one would be really nice to play with more than one person; there’s really too much for one company to handle well. I did the balancing really well on this one, though. It’s definitely my favorite right now.
Dib’s King Coal: Coming soon. A rewrite of Tigard Transcontinental with better hydrology and far more limited starting resources; the towns are tiny and the industries produce very little.
The city of Tigard about 3/4 of the way through my best game so far of Tigard Transcontinental. I eventually replaced the Tigard Yard <-> Tigard Port line with river barges, but most of everything else remained the same. The limiting factor on this map turned out to be that I didn’t have space to add more tracks at Tigard station. If I had to do this again, I know several ways that I’d do it better.