How to build working On-Street Running Railroad lines

[Reece202]

Before we begin, for those unfamiliar, the definition of On-Street running: Any place where road traffic and heavy rail traffic share a common right of way.

Through experimentation, I found this method which gives a real-traffic and UDI functional Rail to GLR transition.

Showing both real-traffic and UDI capabilities

Step 1

Place the rail line and the road, leaving 2 tiles between them.


Place a 'Straight Rail under Perpendicular Straight DTR' from the 'Underground Rail Rail Intersection pieces' TAB-ring on the tile next to the end of the rail line. Be sure the starters are to either side of the rail line you are working on.


Bulldoze the starters, which leaves you with a starterless piece of rail in the same direction as the rest of your route.


Connect the starterless piece of rail to the rest of the rail. Place the appropriate tram-in-road to tram puzzle-piece on the remaining end of the railway, and continue with tram-in-road as normal.

Congratulations! You now have a working section of street trackage. To go back to rail, just mirror this setup on the other end of the line.

-Reece

[Kitsune]

I can't wait to hear why that is possible - I always thought those pieces used el-rail paths...

[Reece202]

I honestly have no clue why this works. I too thought they were el-rail's, but I guess they are interchangable. 

EDIT: Possible reason why it works; URail works similar to FLUPs. FLUPs (as far as I know) are actually El-Rail paths, and URail is similar to FLUPs, so my guess is that it temporarily switches the Rail automata and traffic data to use th El-Rail paths, but without changing the cargo/sims to El-Rail trains. Since the piece used to get a starterless rail connection is a URail piece, maybe the path switching abilites are kept in the tile or something. Although, I could be completely wrong here...

[jondor]

Actually, in order for light rail UDI to function, all light rail networks have duplicate heavy rail paths added. (The light rail UDI mission is actually a heavy rail UDI starting at a light rail station, if you have an ELR or GLR station next to heavy rail you will occasionally start out on the heavy rail tracks.)

The road network can actually carry heavy rail traffic (just as the heavy rail network can carry car traffic, like the DDRHW-4), the traffic simulator simply follows the paths and doesn't seem to mind.  This doesn't work with GLR because the ELR network cannot carry heavy rail traffic.  No idea why Maxis set it up that way, but they did.

[rooker1]

This is fantastic.  I can't wait to try this in one of my industrial areas.
K-Point for you sir!!

Robin

[metarvo]

On-Street railroads (for heavy rail, no less) were fairly common back in the day.  Due to safety concerns and the decline of the railroads in general, the concept has been largely abandoned.  However, the railroads are very much revitalized in SC4, as evidenced by the heat of the topic in recent times.  So, the discovery of on-street railroads is a big bonus.  Good job, Reece!

[LReyomeXX]

For a modern day example, look no further then Inception

[Tilarium]

   Thanks!  This is one of the things that's been perplexing me for years, ever sense the tram-in-road pieces were introduced.  Can't wait to add this into the game.  Anyone have a good rail stopped to keep freight trains for getting on them?  I can't remember what the one I used to use was called or where I found it.  Pretty sure it was Simtropolis, but there searching there isn't great and it doesn't offer a way to sort the DLs by what you're looking for (traffic-rail, traffic-road, residential, commercial, etc etc) which makes finding anything on there a matter of patience (of looking through all of the DLs) or luck (finding the sweet search term to get what you want).

[SimGuy24]

Wow. Unbelievable! So I don't have to use rail viaducts anymore, ultimately, because the train would go up the transition.....you've discovered a breakthrough. You should be proud.