Sid Meier’s Railroads has a long history of crashing. We’ve had fixes yes, but many of them are buried in ancient forum topics. This article summarizes the various bugs and known fixes. It should relieve nearly all known issues with Sid Meiers Railroad. It is organized into two sections, general fixes for bugs that effect the SMR game engine and ‘Custom map fixes’, for bugs that create defective custom maps. The majority of crashes are caused by ‘General’ bugs since these are defects in the users install of SMR while ‘custom map’ bugs are problems with the map itself.
General Fixes
Install Patch 1.10
Prior to 1.10 SMR was still a very unstable game. Updating SMR to 1.10 is critical. You do not need to install the 1.01 patch before 1.10 since 1.10 contains all the changes 1.01 had. Blame Firaxis for the close version numbers. If you were having problems and SMR was not updated to 1.10, then stop reading this article and update it. The 1.10 patch download.
3GB Enabler
Large maps logically use more RAM, unfortunately by default Railroads.exe only uses 2GB which means it will crash when it tries to use more than this. The 3GB Enabler allows Railroads.exe to use more than 2GB. If your experiencing crashes while playing large maps follow SMR Simple’s guide on installing the 3GB Enabler.
Empty the maps folder
Most maps cannot be installed while another custom map is present. This includes the ‘Holiday scenario’ official custom map. Make sure to clean out other custom maps before installing a new map, use the ‘How to empty “my games/sid meiers railroads”‘ guide.
Stock maps will crash while SAM or CIC maps are installed
If you have any SAM or CIC maps installed you will not be able to play the normal stock maps that originaly were included in SMR. To play stock maps again simply remove the SAM or CIC map.
Custom Map Fixes
Random Crashes due to Events.xml
Any map which uses a customized list of Goods must use an Events.xml which does not contian any events that reference Goods which the map does not contian. Should a random event come up which needs a good the map does not include in goods.xml the game will crash. Because these crashes are random they are the most painful and mysterious to debug.
Best list of fixes for this game ever!
ya this list has everything and they all work to bfore my game was piece of crap
wait after 3 hours of playing it crashed i cant believe it nvm me other comment this sucks
What was the game doing when it crashed Jared?
When playing some time the tracks starts to disappear. Any known fixes?
Running on Vista with 3G enabler on.
Probably you mean that the tracks disappear if you lay them with the game paused. If you let the game run in slow mode during track-laying, that problem disappears.
I’ve been trying to get this game to stop crashing for ever! I’ve tried soo many things, the 3GB Enabler, reinstalling, patched it. Nothing works. It will play for about a minute then crash. Anyone have any other help?
You need to tell us a bit more: do you have a modern machine (>2GB memory, powerful modern graphics card)? Do the standard game maps run well after a full delete, reinstall and patch – don’t install any custom user maps before you have a stable running system!
I have 3 GB memory, ATI Radeon HD 5650 1GB dedicated RAM and my game crash every 5-10 minutes and I’m playing the standard maps. Any help?Thanks
Hi, thanks for this great webpage.
It is a pity, that I cann’t use it, because of the 3GB problem.
I tried all of this mentioned above, but after installing patch 1.10 I got SecuROM installed and this is not able to detect my original, bought DVD-Rom.
I give up.
so I got the game from Steam and when I try to do the patch, it’s saying I don’t have the game installed… anyway around this. I got no clue if the patch is automatically applied through them or not.
Apparently steam installs to a slightly different directory path, so you need to take account of that when patching.
The Steam Version Is already Patched but some people find they have a lot of problems with it. The best way around it is to buy a CD version of the game and dump the steam version as they seem to be very troublesome to a lot of folks.
Good URL for SMR Patch 1.10
https://www.softwarepatch.com/railroadspatch110-zip/