I have finally managed to beat it on investor level with hard routing difficulty.
The first era is rather difficult: in 20 years you have to connect two rather distant cities and you have to transport 10 carloads of passengers from A to B and 10 carloads of passengers from C to D. This sounds easy enough until you realize that both B and D are villages and don't yet accept passengers. You have to GROW them to towns first. This takes time and you have to start as soon as possible. It took me several starts until I succeeded. Trick is to connect everything before you actually buy trains.
Second era presents another challenges: you have to transport 50 carloads of mail from three locations. Trick here is to grow some neighbouring village to accept mail so that train does not have to go too far.
There is one trick you have to figure out to succeed: This is that in Railroads!, available goods is
![Idea :idea:](./images/smilies/icon_idea.gif)
ROUNDED UP
![Idea :idea:](./images/smilies/icon_idea.gif)
. When town contains incomplete production, it will still fill one car in the train. You can tell that town has incomplete production when it is displaying 0 as number of specific item, this means that there is already one carload of goods available. If there is nothing, town does not show anything. You can also see how much of production is already complete in the train routing screen. If you don't specify train to wait till full, it will pick it up and go with it. So if you set up one or two trains moving stuff from one place to the nearby place, you can extract much more than the city actually produces. To put it simply, if it takes a minute to produce a single passenger, if you manage to get ten trains to enter the city during that time, each will pick up whatever portion of the passenger and rounded UP (=1), you end up with 10 passengers transported out of the city, if you manage more, you get more passengers. it is important to upgrade to Terminals as soon as you can afford it because it increases the revenue and speeds up loading and unloading.
Third era is not too difficult, you have to setup paralel line to transport enough oil. For goods, you can actually use the trick I have just described for mail.
Four era is, in some way, most difficult because you have to transport 3x200 carloads of passengers from Madrid. I have failed misserably several times until I realised that the only way to succeed is to keep picking up passengers from Madrid as quickly as possible. For that, I have established trianglular tracks so that I can force trains to go on one track in one direction and on other track back (you can see example on the screenshot, Zaragoza Grain Company is really only used as a kind of one way gate - see
http://www.hookedforums.com/forwarder.h ... php?t=1259 for details, relevant screenshot is the one from SouthWest US scenario). I have planted at least 5 trains on each route, just two passenger cars each so that in case Madrid manages to grow more than one passenger, it will get picked up (When looking back it was probably unnecessary because for most parts, train had only one passenger car full. Then again, it did not cause any penalty because empty cars do not count in Railroads!). Also make sure you double parts of the track so that, for example, train in Madrid does not have to wait till the one ahead of it arrives to Barcelona but could get on the way as soon next segment of the track is cleared. You also need to start hauling passengers as soon as you can afford it because even with all these tricks, it takes its time (I started soon after 1850). Planning ahead is rather important on this map because you have to buy some industries or grow cities ahead of time, some times, like when you need Cadiz to accept automobiles, from village to metropolis.
Last tricky part is to setup AVE/TGV trains to achieve average speed of over 100 mph. Depending on how you built your previous tracks, you may need to delete them and build them again. Also make sure that each route has only one train running on it and that it has its own dedicated platform because if it has to wait for another train to depart, average speed goes down. Also you need to have only one train on each route. Actually you only need one train on a single route as long as other routes don't have any trains (unfortunately, it seems that no train counts as nothing, not as train with 0 speed).
Co be continued....