A maximalist British train set featuring over 200 trains with:
- Long vehicle scale
- 2x sprites for all vehicles
- Smooth curve and hill animations
- 2CC selectable company colours
- Support for FIRS, ECS and YETI cargo types
It's recommended (although not necessary) to use this set with Timberwolf's Tracks. You may also be interested in Timberwolf's UK Road Vehicles for a consistent visual style and gameplay balance.
Trains are much more expensive to purchase (and rather more expensive to run) than the standard OpenTTD vehicles. Start small and don't over-extend at first; buy small tank engines for your first route and upgrade when you have a profitable network.
Some options for starting out:
- 1 or 2 small tank engines running short (2-3 tile) coal, iron or wood services.
- 1 medium locomotive with 2-3 carriages and a mail van running between two mid-sized towns.
- A short passenger line between 3 or 4 close together towns using railcars or low end multiple units.
When starting a game after 1980, it may be easier to build up some profitable road vehicle routes rather than gambling most of your loan on a single train.
Costs can be adjusted in parameters if you prefer an easier (or harder) game.
You will need to replace your trains even with breakdowns set to "off"! As trains reach the end of their useful life their running costs will increase, leaving you facing a trade-off between decreasing profits and a large bill for new locomotives.
The default "spicy" setting is balanced to make keeping a particularly good class of locomotive running for a few extra years a viable option if the route it serves is highly profitable. You might find yourself envisaging an alternate history where the 1930s streamliners were eked out until the HST came along, or the APT-P plied modern mainline services alongside Voyagers and Pendolinos.
Vehicles that were unsuccessful, unreliable or only built as experimental prototypes tend to have shorter usable life in game; be warned that if you use them, you will spend a lot more on replacement or running costs than the more proven options.
Tip: If you're playing Villages Is Villages with economic settings enabled, increasing your operating expenses with some older vehicles will make it easier to save up cash for a megaproject, without losing it all to dividend payouts.
Unlike many sets, you will only be able to purchase multiple units in their prototypical consists. These can however be coupled together to form longer trains.
Working between multiple classes is supported with realistic rules, so you can couple a Class 455 to a Class 456 but not to a Sprinter.
As units with 8+ car consists and long carriages would be excessively long, by default consists are truncated to a maximum 6 tiles. This can be disabled (or reduced to 4 tiles) with a parameter, but beware you will need some very large stations to handle a full 20-car Eurostar consist.
Some vehicles have bonuses or penalties which apply to either that unit or the whole train which contains them. These are displayed in the purchase menu. The most common types of bonus:
- Passengers pay more for long distance journeys. (Typically express vehicles with slow loading speeds)
- Passengers pay less for long distance journeys. (Typically urban vehicles with high loading speeds)
- Slow trains travel faster with this wagon attached. (Brake vans)
The brake van bonus can be useful early game when wagons are slow.
There are certain symbols used in the purchase menu to indicate certain vehicle behaviours:
... 
: this is a multiple unit, with the specified
number of cars.
: this vehicle will reverse when placed at
the end of a train, or can be coupled
nose to nose when doubled headed. A
second power car is not required.
: this vehicle will reverse when placed at
the end of a train. A second power car is
required. (i.e. you must purchase at
least two and place them in the same
consist)
Building from source is unfortunately not user-friendly. You will need to build a lot of prerequisites and have access to the GNU tools, either via a Linux or Mac environment or Windows via Git Bash or WSL.
(Note that the executables are expected to have Windows-style names, take note if you are building the Go projects on a different platform)
You will need to obtain and build the following:
- GoRender - used for rendering voxel objects.
- Purchaser - used for creating purchase menu sprites.
- Cargopositor - used for compositiing cargo and animation objects.
- Roadie - used for templating and creating NML files.
If you want to play around with the sprite templates and offsets (xrels/yrels) these are generated using Temporarily Late, but it is not necessary if you're happy using the existing templates.
The build expects to find prerequisites in the following relative folder structure (note .exe extension):
- Roadie:
../roadie/roadie.exe - GoRender:
../gorender/renderobject.exe - Cargopositor:
../cargopositor/cargopositor.exe - Purchaser:
../purchaser/purchaser.exe
To build the full set, run ./build.sh. This will take a long time as it needs to render every vehicle.
Future runs will not overwrite files, to re-render something you will need to delete its PNG file from
the 2x directory.
If you are iterating something in NML and don't need to go through the sprite build process, you can
use ./roadie.sh instead for a quicker build.
./produce_templates.sh rebuilds templates using Temporarily Late, if necessary.