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 of the carriages offer buffet/restaurant cars. These have a high running cost and small passenger capacity, but provide a bonus to long distance travel for the entire consist. This can be well worth using on long, busy routes.
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.
Preservation railways are a new feature for the Community Addon. In order to build a preservation railway, attach a carriage marked as having the "Preserve railway bonus" to an old locomotive.
As locomotives get older, passengers will enjoy longer trips before the amount they pay for their journey reduces; people in the OpenTTD world are more interested in travelling behind a 100 year old locomotive than a 30-40 year old one. A longer preserved line with smaller and cheaper locomotives over a century old can be very profitable!
Note that elderly mainline locomotives will be very expensive to run, even at the restricted speeds of a preservation railway. Long-lived narrow gauge locomotives may be an easier option, emulating the very first preserved railways.
The Community Addon features a new type of railway: narrow gauge. This will show up if you have a railtype set that includes the NGRL track type - as ever, Timberwolf's Tracks is recommended.
Narrow gauge trains are smaller, slower and have lower capacities than their mainline counterparts. However they are also cheaper to buy and run, and exceptionally long lived. This makes them a good option for starting the game when funds are limited, or for servicing industries with low output.
Due to their long life, narrow gauge locomotives are an excellent option for running preserved railways.
Horse-drawn trains on narrow gauge railways can benefit from dandy wagons - these allow the horse to ride in a wagon when travelling downhill and gravity to take over, resulting in much higher speeds.
Each dandy wagon can carry two ponies. You will need to build enough dandy wagons for all of your horses to benefit from them. When a train has sufficient dandy wagons the colour of horses will change as an indication. (And not just because the set needs to do so in order to make horse colours consistent between when the horses are in or out of a wagon).
Such gravity railways are a highly viable option early on in the game, if you can find suitably located industries.
British Railways had a complex and often difficult history, especially in the 1960s when some considered the railways to be a historical irrelevance and that road transport was to be the future.
This means that BR either did not continue to develop or abandoned some forms of cargo transport entirely, even where a keen OpenTTD player might consider that a matter for the railway to handle.
To enable this style of gameplay, a small number of extra vehicles representing plausible "what-if?" scenarios are included with this set. These are noted in the description whan purchasing, but if you prefer the challenge of working out what to do with cargo that BR stopped transporting in the mid 20th century, they can be disabled via parameter.
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.