[pierreh]

Thanks a lot for your comments, Brian and Darth. I am relieved to see that the deprecated piece is still in NAM 37, it gives me some confidence relatively to the upgrade, that I'll undertake sooner or later. Darth, I share fully your view that too large interchanges eat up a lot of space to the detriment of buildings in cities.

For a change I return to one of my pet subjects, railways.

As already mentioned, I have implemented railways in all my cities, but with very different results. In some cities the railways develop well, are properly used and contribute properly to the general commuting of Sims (and goods in the case of freight traffic). In other cities their contribution remains marginal, or even totally inexistent, to the point where I have sometimes removed unused sections of railway. Probably a very careful, detailed study of the railway lines in relation with the location of zones would explain the success of some lines and the failure of some other lines. At least intuitively, it appears to me that this is similar to a lottery: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, search me for the reasons.

When it works, it can work very well. Here is an axample in Arcens, where from a railway station 2 pairs of dual tracks lead to 2 different adjacent cities. First the layout:



Now the traffic volume view. There is an imbalance between the dual tracks but none is saturated (at least not yet, I may add...)



The station where the tracks originate (this is a terminal station, tracks do not continue on the other side) sees intense exchanges between the railway, the subway lines and buses. This is the way I like my railway stations to function, but it is not always the case.