“SAM” stands for “Stand Along Map” while “SAM2” stands for “Stand Alone Map2”, there is no difference to the end users between the two. If a file is marked as a “SAM” or “SAM2” that means it has been packaged in such a way that all you have to do is uncompress it and move it into your “My Games\Sid Meier’s Railroads!\UserMaps” folder. This is a dramatic improvement over the method first used where one might have to download up to five maps and install them for a new map to work.  Now it may seem at first that this is really a regression, after all now you can only have one map installed at a time. In this case though the benefits out weigh the cost quite a bit. Sadly some Sid Meier’s Railroads! files cannot be edited per map without chaning things for the entire game, an example of which is the tunnels.xml. The tunnels.xml stores the costs for both tunnels and bridges, many mappers like to change these costs to create more realistic maps. As well the game has a fairly low limit of how many unique goods there can be in the game, beyond this limit the game simply ignores the other goods. Perhaps though the biggest reasoning is that Sid Meier’s Railroads is not conservative when it comes to memory use and will load up every asset in the Sid Meier’s Railroads! folder it can find. By limiting the amount of unused files the game loads, maps can be made larger with the memory available.
The effort to get every Sid Meier’s Railroads custom map into the SAM format was spearheaded by Snoopy55, Bobby, Tijer and Pete colectivly known as STEP inc, credit also goes to Jancsika for pakaging a number of maps.
You might also incounter “Clean install Compatible” aka “CIC” pakaged maps, these can be installed jsut like “SAM”s would be by copying the files into the “My Games\Sid Meier’s Railroads!\UserMaps” folder.
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Big fan of your site.
Its reenergized my interest in the game.
Question for you. I’ve been scouring the web for the 3GB_enabler2zip file. I can’t seem to locate it anywhere. Every link that is posted is a dead link.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thx.
Jerrad
Sure no problem, I made a post about this a few days ago and included an edited version I made just for SMR.
http://www.smrsimple.com/2009/12/play-larger-maps-3gb-enabler/
It is at the very end of the post.
Thanks!
Hello,
the new maps look intriguing, but I am confused on how to manage them after they have been downloaded.
I unzipped the files, but where should they be located then exactly, in the my maps directory? And then how do I locate them from within the game?
Tom.
This should help you: http://www.smrsimple.com/2009/06/how-to-manage-custom-maps-by-hand/
Hi,
Dear Friends. I have Downloaded Sid Meier’s Railroads from Torrent.
I am using Windows Vista.
When I try to play the game it runs only for 10-15 minutes and Crashes.Please help me in this issue how can i solve this problem.
I am really a big fan of this game.
I also downloaded the New Patch V1.1 from the official site but when I Install that Patch then My game crashes just in few seconds.
Please help me.
Thanks
Maybe try using a different nocd patch
Just a few corrections to this post.
1) SAM has always stood for Stand Alone Map, regardless of version 1 or 2.
2) Snoopy55 and Tijer created SAM and SAM2. Bobby and Pete volunteered to be there testers. Since then Bobby has learned to build and repair maps under the SAM format.
Thank You
guys wudnt it be easyer if u made a map file that u dont need to delete to get a new map to work insted of using hours to look up for files that came whit and new files to place?? ust asking
Keato02