Cities Skylines Building Railroads Tips

Cities Skylines Building Railroads Tips by tytenn4a03

Here are some of the discoveries I made during the game. I think most of these are workarounds to bugs/bad systems, but still.

1. Make sure passenger trains and freights trains are not sharing the same network

This belongs to the “bad design” category because CS is generating a /lot/ of passenger trains that only have a few passengers, jamming up freight trains in the process.
If you want to go even further, make sure the passenger train network is unreachable from outside. This will pretty much kill all passenger traffic, even if they don’t use any of your stations (well, there are none to start with).

2. Build your intersections on the right (or left, if you’re in an English town)

This is to ensure that outgoing traffic do not block incoming traffic, causing a deadlock. This is especially important if you’re building terminal stations, but…

3. Avoid building passenger terminal stations, and absolutely don’t build terminal cargo stations

Right now, trains will only occupy one platform (the entry one) and ignore the other platform, even though it is free. This will jam up your station really quickly.

To handle this, I use a turnaround loop so that trains can enter from both sides.

4. Build your cargo station near the commercial/industrial areas, and near a Cargo Harbour

This is a no-brainer.

5. Give dedicated roads for the section between your cargo station and the harbour

Your CiMs will thank you.

6. Make sure your cargo train network is well-connected

Your cargo stations will send cargo trains from one station to another. Making sure that they are well-connected will save you a lot of car trips, freeing up your roads and highways.

7. Trains seem to climb hills slower than cars

I’m not exactly sure but it seems to be the case (makes sense anyway), so you should probably be building bridges for cars, not trains.

8. If you are moving a station, make sure to unset its stops first

If you don’t, sometimes the line will break.

If you have a tip to share, feel free to comment below.

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1 Response

  1. George Stiller says:

    I do some of what tytenn4a03 describes and more. I use a four track train system in Cities Skyline on my Playstation 4. Doing so avoids massive back ups. Four tracks side-by-side really close to each other. Three main tracks are for freight lines with each dedicated to specific rail cargo stations. For example, one line for connecting local cargo terminals, a second one is for express trains that only stop at specific cargo terminals separated by great distances. The third line is an express track that enables trains to switch back and forth with the other two tracks, it does not connect to cargo terminals directly. For example my current project has no external rail connection. As a result I have both an air cargo terminal and two rail cargo terminals at the only highway entry in to my city. So I assigned h dedicated line for the air cargo terminal and separate ones for each of the two cargo terminals. Despite this limitation my city at one point reached a population of 299,800 before it ran out of water and the sea water mixed with my fresh water and made everyone sick.

    The fourth line is a passenger line. Wherever possible I loop the track of each station or cargo terminal in order to get two-way traffic. I assign my train cargo terminals to specific businesses like a farm or forestry operation. In some cases the business needs more than one cargo terminal close to each other because it does a lot of exporting and as a result each needs a dedicated main track from another far off destination assigned to them to avoid backing up the entire train system. In some cases I weave the entry track to the train cargo terminal in a long serpentine fashion to enable as many as eight trains to queue up without backing up on to the main track and create a traffic nightmare when they block switches. It keeps my exiting cargo terminal trains from being blocked by the entry queued trains and preventing the cargo terminal from operating because the entry trains can’t move. Resulting in total grid lock.

    Oh, and I love creating complex seven layer systems where roads, trams and rail are layered on top of each other in order to get inter-connectivity between main lines. I even will lower the ground in a groove to enable a rail track to pass under a mess of layered tracks without having to have long ramps for tunnels.

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