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Englesdorf Station

Started by z, July 04, 2010, 01:03:16 AM

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z

For a long time, I have been looking for some sort of rail station that I could use for rail lines that run down the middle of highways, as is common in the U.S.  Finally, I found exactly what I was looking for:  Englesdorf Station!



There's only one problem here:  What do the Sims do when they reach the road at the top of the elevators?  The road in this picture is composed entirely of puzzle pieces, so the Sims have to walk many tiles until they reach a bus stop.  This is very time consuming, and it makes the rail much less attractive as a transportation option to the Sims.  Instead, why not add a transit switch for pedestrians to buses (and the reverse) to the Englesdorf station?  To avoid the symmetry problems with SC4, it would apply to both the east and west sides of the station, but only one of those would ever be used.  This way, the Sims could take the elevator to the road, and buses would stop there to pick them up (or drop them off).  I have already added these switches to my copy of the station, but I think that many other users would find this to be a popular addition.

One more request for this station:  Is it possible to have a diagonal version of it?  I think the most useful version would be to have the elevators line up with an orthogonal road that crosses the tracks.  You could do either one of these, or variations to handle either station orientation.  And then if you go that far, it takes only one more variation to handle a diagonal road crossing diagonal tracks.

Anyway, thanks very much for a wonderful station that is the only one I've found that will fulfill these transportation needs! :)

EDIT:  One thing I just noticed is that the Transit Switch Entry Costs for this whole pack of stations is way too high - about ten times too high in most cases.  For the current NAM Simulator, the proper value should be .006857, while for the Maxis-based simulators the proper value is .0064, so something in that vicinity should work well.  Otherwise, especially with the long stations, the rail lines are not speed competitive with other forms of transportation (especially the highway in my example), and very few Sims will take them.  These are such nice stations, we wouldn't want that to happen!  $%Grinno$%

Andreas

The Transit Switch Entry Cost values date to a time when there was still a huge discussion about the "best" values, so I picked what was suggested back then. I agree that they should receive an update someday, and yes, diagonal versions would be nice as well. Kenworth has been busy with RL lately, but hopefully, he'll find some time for SC4 over the summer holidays again.
Andreas

z