The Solitaire thing is the best solution to a lot of crashes. This game refuses to let go of memory when you close it or it closes itself. Most anything that you know will use memory will work, but I click on Solitaire, move a card, and close it. quick and simple way to be sure it’s an error and not the game hoarding memory. Changing maps does not release memory. The crash effect railage mentions may do it, but I rely on Solitaire myself, when you are frustrated with the game, it helps to play something else that is relaxing, and believe me, this game has frustrated me often…..

With the arrival of SAM format, short for stand-alone-map, the intent is that everything be placed in Usermaps. The exact folder structure within doesn’t matter.

Try to see if the map will work when you throw everything into Usermaps. If not, don’t give up, there are still things to tweak.

In ..Documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Railroads(!) you will find a file called Settings . ini. Open this, Notepad will do, and change the setting for Precache, to =0. Save the file.

The above should help, but may not entirely remove the “memory effect”, once a game crashed on load it’s likely to continue to crash. With XP apparently Solitaire helps. What I do is make an attempt to load a default map, I know it wont work, purposely crashing the game. Then it will start fresh with the map I want to load.

I just completed a Sheffield start on Liverpool & Manchester 2. Good challenge!

Scott in Kabul

Take heart though in the fact that it is not near as bad as it was historically.