When I heard of the up and coming Mass Transit DLC by CO I decided to get back into the game and use the time before it's release trying out some new transport ideas for my next mega city. Previously, all my cities suffered from traffic congestions, some minor, some pretty bad which often required lots of demolishing and reorganising of the effected areas. All part of managing large cities I guess...

Using trains in cities is nothing new, there are plenty of well written and informative guides regarding their use, ranging from isolating certain parts of your city to track configurations, all in all, very useful information and well worth reading.

Now for some reason I was never keen or interested in using large train networks as they always tended to get quite complicated to manage once you had several lines and more running across a large map. Besides, roads seemed to be so much easier use, just plop them down and the cims would use them with no complaints.

This humble guide offers a new approach to building your cities, which is in two parts..

Firstly, building your cities around your Train Networks rather than around roads and while this playstyle will most probably be quite different to the one your normally used to using (which is a good thing), it will allow you to try new things out that you might otherwise have never considered before.

2. Seperating your Residential, Industry / Offices and Commercial zones from each other with access to them via your Passenger Rail Network.

Just one more thing to mention here.. I know that the example layout used within my three zones is extremely ugly and basic. It's just a throw-a-way test city.

Finally, no mods, third part assets or DLC is needed to follow this guide.

This is my Test City & Map,

Because I wanted to get this city up and running as fast as possible, not wanting to spend days or weeks on it, the following internal and external mods were used to speed this process up.

1. Unlimted Money
2. Unlock all Progression Milestones
3. Unlock all Tiles at Start.
4. 25 Spaces by S Klyte.
5. All Areas purchasable.
6. Automatic Buldoze V2
7. Move it! V1.7.5 by SamsamTS

Current City Population 68K
The city itself is divided into three, seperate areas or zones, they being:

1. Residential
2. Commercial & Leisure
3. Industry & Offices.

There is one outside road connection to the Residential Zone. The Commercial & Industrial zones are both connected to the Residential Zone via a Passenger Rail system only. No roads.

The Industial Zone has two Rail Cargo stations, one is dedicated to receive outside goods only, These goods are then transfered to the second Rail Cargo station that then transferes them to the Commercial Zone.

The overal view for this city is as follows.. The residential Zone supplies and drives the workforce for the Industrial / Office Zone and Shoppers for the Commercial Zone in a closed system. The Industrial & Commercial Zones are closed because this prevents outside cims with their freight trucks etc from clogging up the roads inside them. They cant go through my Residential Zone because their are no roads they can use to access them. So I have no need for setting any Policies restricting their access..

Services such as Garbage, Hospitals, Fire, Police, Undertakers etc are duplicated in both the Commercial & Industrial Zones since neither one can access each other.

The roads within the Commercial & Industrial Zones are able to remain green because the cims can only access them via the Railway System. Though some do carry pocket cars, but not many. Because the roads are clog free, all services can freely access the whole zone quickly without encountering any traffic problems, thereby lowering the number of services you would normally need.


Overview of the Residential Zone.
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One outside road connection from the highway leading into the Residential Area.

The power house for driving your businesses and factories.


Passenger Railway Stations.
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Originally I had 5 vanilla Rail Passenger Stations here but changed over to the multiplatform stations from the Mass Transport DLC as these made it so much easier to use not to mention making the underground tracks much tidier.


The left hand Multiplatform Station with it's 6 lines, 12 platforms I assigned to transporting my cims to the Industrial Zone. Currently using two lines out of the available 6. There are no buses, Metro's, monorails etc for the cims to use, no real reason, just not seen a need to have any of these at the moment. They are all happy to walk to the station.

The second from the left Multiplatform Station is currently held as a spare. Can be used for any areas requiring Specialized Industry such as Forestry, Ore Mining etc.


Third from the left Multiplatform Station I assigned to the Commercial Zone. Currently using 4 of it's six available lines. By far, the most used railway station.

Fourth from the left Multiplatform Station is held as a spare.

I choose to use underground railway lines because it was easier to setup and it also kept the centre area free for other purposes. More of this later.

I have combined both the Generic Industry and Offices into this zone which is currently well supplied with the nessasary workforce from the single multiplatform railway station. I also have two Railway Cargo stations here supplying freight for my generic Industry and Commercial Zone.



A close up view of the two Rail Freight Stations. Cargo Station A is dedicated soley for the handling of imported frieght for my Generic Industry and Commercial Zones. Goods are offloaded by truck from Cargo Station A then traffic is looped behind Cargo Station A to Cargo Station B. From there frieght is delivered to my Industry close by. While these dedicated 'freight roads' do indeed receive heavy use, they rarely if ever grind to a standstil and have little or no impact anywhere else in my Industrial Zone, where the roads remain pretty much green. It's not perfect by far, but it works.

Similar layout to the Industrial Zone, this time it combines both the normal daytime commercial buildings and AfterDark nightime businesses since I also have this DLC.

The single rail cargo station in this zone recieves freight only from the Industrial Zone. Most of the traffic shown above comes from the Cargo Station itself, along with some traffic generated by the commercial buildings themselves and some from pocket cars carried by some of the cims.

As you can see from the above pictures, traffic is very light throughout the rest of this zone. The three Cargo Stations combined is what keeps my Road Efficency at around 91-92%, my imports are very high. However, my Road Effiency can be increased even further had I set up some Oil, Ore, Wood specialization industries, which was my original intention with the two spare multiplatform stations in my Residential Zone.

I've had a lot of fun with this city, I went from seeing trains as a quick fix to some of my traffic problems to seeing them more useful and practical than using medium to long distance roads. The new Multiplatform Train Stations from the Mass Transit DLC are amazing to use, they work as intended and for me at least, a welcome feature for this game.

The test city itself was slapped together without much thought or care, the industry and commercial zones are way out of blance with each other, imports are sky hight. Other transport services such as metro's and buses are missing and is just a ugly mess from start to finish, however, it works well enough to keep growing regardless. So, for a test city I learned a lot more about this game that I would otherwise have missed out on.


Thanks for taking the time to read this *cough* quick guide..


Freelancer