do you use same tracks for freight and passenger lines?

[mjrudolphi]

Or do you create separate lines for them? I have tried combining but gets really busy.

[Saint Landwalker]

I don't. It's not a matter of busy-ness, for me, it's a matter of differences in speed.

[SBGaming]

Depending on where I need to send rail traffic to, I'll either combine Passenger and Freight or keep them separate. On my current freeplay map, between Norfolk and Chula Vista, the freight and Passenger stations are on opposite sides of the towns, and the towns are relatively close together, thus it doesn't make sense to combine them, only to split them off again. Leading up to Tampa from Chula Vista, all rail traffic merges to one double-tracked line. Tampa is an end of the Line Town, and the Freight and Passenger stations are practically next to each other.

Between Norfolk and Columbus the Passenger and Freight lines merge together briefly for a downhill stretch, and then split off, because like in Norfolk and Chula Vista, the Industrial is all on one side of the town, Residential is on the other side of time..

At Paterson, the town's Freight station is near the Goods Factory, and I have plans to grow the town in that direction, while the Passenger station is near the town's existing residential area, and since I know the corridor between Chula Vista to Paterson is going to be busy, I've kept the lines separate.

With the line running up to Waco and Cape Coral in the corner of the map, from Paterson, like Tampa, both towns are End of the Line towns, and the stations are fairly close to one another. If the game had Passenger/Freight combined stations I'd probably just use a single larger 5 or 6 platform station for these towns, rather than two separate stations.

Heading up to Palm Bay from Paterson in the other direction, Freight and Passenger services will probably combine, though if I go four track, it'll probably be so that one is for High Speed services, and the other is for slower speed services, depending on whether the freight or passenger services are running the fast or slow trains.

On other parts of the map I'll be running dedicated Passenger or Freight rail in different places because there's no reason to send the other type of traffic in those directions, due to the map, placement of towns and resources.

As I've never really played much past the 1930's, my passenger and freight services tend to be running the same trains, currently either Moguls or Atlantics (though more recently M-300's), and I have some of each on my Passenger and Freight lines.

Where possible I try to combine Passenger and Freight because it is often done real world, though the game is a bit limited since trains can't dynamically shift their route to overtake slower vehicles like what would happen in the real world.

[canophone]

I find arriving at a station, they (different lines) should be on separate tracks. Departing from a station, they can be on the same track for a short length.

[maculator]

Since you only got a mashup between block and path signals wich utilizes the bad aspects of both: no. If we had pathfinding for trains and some different signals like in other games I'd use a main line.

[Zourin]

Long transit stretches, sure, share a two-way 2-track connection. However, it's usually better to separate them once you start getting local so the stops don't interfere with one another.

[Kitler Purrtin]

Originally posted by mjrudolphi:

Or do you create separate lines for them? I have tried combining but gets really busy.

I combine them into a double track. I put signals every 400m. Meaning whenever a train passes by a signal completely, I pause the game and put a couple of signals there. Works well. But the differences in speed don't really match if you got such a high singal frequency.

[clixor]

I would love to use mainlines, on some places i have 16 tracks running now and it's kinda crazy if you think about it.

Unfortunately, signals aside, there is the problem that train scales are way off, i understand this is for aesthetic reasons, but if you running full capacity on a plant, the track is more or less full already with trains running only that type of cargo, let alone other types of traffic.

Then there is the management issue, with the color coding for lines as it is, it's quite hard to keep track what is what.