Realistic Cities For Dummies

[figui]

i´d go with B.

[Joronamo]

B also

[smileymk]

Hey guys. Sorry for the delay in getting this to you - uni projects and exams have got in the way for the past couple of weeks, and the content for this lesson took a while to create.

Before I do the replies, it has come to my attention that the comments made in response to Lesson 17 have taken us past the 400-post mark. This is testament to your brilliant support, so a massive thank you is in order to everyone who has helped this MD get this far. It also means, of course, means that this MD is less than 100 posts away from promotion to the Classics section.
Of course, it'll still take a bit of time to reach the 500-post threshold, but with the line relatively near, I'd like to ask you to continue your fantastic support and help us get there that little bit sooner. I'm sure you'd love to see RCFD in the Classics section as much as I would.

And now it's time to do the replies. Firstly, thanks go to thebagleboy, veger, compdude787, Wodong, yochananmichael, kelis, figui and Joronamo for voting for the next city tile to be developed. I'll announce the results at the end of the update.
In response to your other comments:

thebagleboy: Thank you. In fairness, the last few lessons have been pretty short, so didn't take to long to create or to write up. But I also think they've turned out quite nicely.

Gugu3: Thank you.

trabman11: Thanks - I know these updates are appreciated by the great support that they get. And that support is just as appreciated by me, so thanks once again.
(Also, try to put everything you want to say into a single post. I know we're trying to reach that 500 mark, but we have to be fair and respectful to the other MDs and their creators.)

veger: Thanks. I'm glad that these lessons are useful.

compdude787: Indeed. The beauty of this game is that playing it is an art form, and everyone has their own approach to creating their cities. I have explained why I didn't put a junction at the location in question, but I understand why you and many other players would build one. Neither of us is right or wrong, and ultimately, as long as you do it to a high standard, it doesn't matter what you do in SC4 - you'll still get great results. That's why I love it.

Wodong: Thank you.

yochananmichael: Thanks.

kelis: Thanks! I like the bridge system too, and I can assure you it looks even better now that the delta has been fully beautified, as you'll see in this lesson.

And now it's time to visit Mapleford's first city tile for the final time, and do the delta:

Lesson 18 - River Deltas

In this lesson, we'll be using MMPs to beautify the delta at the end of Mapleford's north river. Although deltas can be developed on without loss of realism, they are extremely fertile areas for obvious reasons, and so should feature an abundance of nature. Besides, it's neither realistic nor aesthetically pleasing to fill absolutely every square inch of land with urban development. Some natural space is always a good idea.

So let's get started. We're going to start by adding green rye grass to all of the delta's shores, like we do with shorelines in low-density urban and rural areas, in order to obtain a consistent look.
However, it is common for deltas to feature trees and other nature extending right to the water line, so to get as much nature onto the delta as possible, we're only going to add the rye grass up to the waterline, like so:


Now is also a good time to deepen any areas of water that we may have made too shallow during terraforming, like this area here:


You can see that the light sandy beach texture appears through the water. If you can see this texture, then your water is too shallow. This should be corrected using the God Mode Shallow Valley tool.

When the rye grass is applied, it's time to begin work on the land on the inside of it. We'll start with the southwest island, which we'll turn into marshland.
Marshland typically features plenty of puddles, so let's add these in now:


The main bulk of the marshland is grass and mud, so the next task is to fill the island with these. I found that it's best to add the grass first:


I found adding the mud first made it difficult to add the grass on top of it, giving the marshland a pretty unpleasant apperance. However, adding the grass first and then adding the muddy marsh MMP makes the mud slide underneath the grass, giving a muddy undertexture that is exactly what we're after:


You won't be able to get the mud everywhere, but try to cover as much of the land as you can - but not all of it.

To add some variety, we want to include an area where we don't have filthy mud, preferring instead to leave it as plain grass:


I'm going to add flowers to this area later on in the lesson, as well as some detail around our puddles. For now though, our marshland is done:


Let's move on and do the other islands. Having already covered the shorlines with rye grass, the next step is to add flat rocks in a few places along the shoreline:


We're also going to add some bushes in various places along the shores. For this I'm using the jennets available in the VIP Rural Pack, but any thick bush-like MMP will do just fine:


These bush areas should generally not be too thick. You can see the ideal thickness of bush areas in this overview shot:


Now we're going to fill these three islands with seasonal trees, but before we do that, we need to run some grass along the transport lines to stop us from planting trees on the tracks or the tarmac, as was discussed in Lesson 16:


With this protection in place, we can now put in the seasonal trees:


The essentials for the delta are now in place, so we can turn our attention to adding some finer detail.
Large natual areas like this river delta are just crying out to be filled with a plethora of extra details, and without them, your natural areas won't look complete. (Detailing is, indeed, of paramount imporantance whatever you're doing, as you should already know.)
So let's add some details. We can start with the trees, as we've just done them. In forest-like areas like what we've just made, there's plenty of nature living alongside the trees, like grass.

Seasonal trees offer an advantage here - in winter, they are bare and expose a lot of the underlying terrain. So during the game winter, we can fill in the land under the trees with grass:


Like with the marsh mud, you won't be able to get the grass everywhere, but you can cover enough of the terrain so that when warmer times come, your grass will be visible in certain places beneath the trees - such locations are circled in red in the picture below:


Moving on, I said I was going to add some flowers to the marshland, so let's do that.
After deleting the existing plain grass, I've placed yellow and white flowers in its place, leaving some space to re-lay grass for maximum effect:


Be sure to keep your flower fields random - there should be no discernible pattern to your plants, nor should the area be a regular shape. You can use any colour flower you like, but yellow and white flowers on a grass base are a very common sight, at least where I'm from, making them an easy and realistic way to add natural beauty to your work.

Whilst we're on the marsh, we can also add some detail to our puddles - some reed grass, straw and lily pads should do it:


With that, our marshland is complete, so let's turn our attention to detailing the forest areas on the other islands.
The first thing to do is to fill in any blank areas that we may have missed when planting the trees and underlying grass, like these sandy areas here:


These can be touched up with rye grass, regular grass, reed grass, and, to fill in any small blank areas, dirt (using any suitable MMP), as well as anything else you feel is appropriate. In any case, the idea is to eliminate that light sand texture as much as possible and fill in the untouched areas:


You can see the difference such detailing work makes. Applying this across the whole delta just multiplies the effect.
But why stop here? Why not add some extra features to make this area the best it can be?
Let's continue our detailing crusade by breaking up the monotony of endless trees with some clearings. I've replaced two areas of trees with scrub brush and flowers respectively, but there are plenty of alternative options, so get creative:




We can also detail along the shoreline - for example, we can add lily pads along the sides of narrow channels:


Note that placing lily pads on wide channels or in the sea should be avoided, as this does not look as realistic.

What does look realistic, however, is placing small extra details in the small grass areas created during the touching up of the coastline. The list of things you can add is endless, and there are hundreds of MMPs available for you to use, but here are some ideas. You could place some cattails:


Or some deadfall (a common feature of forested areas, as you might expect):


A nice cameo is to have a fisherman and his boat (examples of which are available in the VIP Rural Pack), as well as a heron taking interest:


As with all cameos, only use them once, lest your scene will have a repetitive apperance.

Moving on, we can also add Johnson grass to our cattail areas:


Or, perhaps, reed grass:


Or maybe just a dirt area:


Or some weeds:


One final option is to go for straw:


These are just some ideas, and there are an awful lot of alternatives - this is an opportunity to be truly creative, so take full advantage of it!
Just remember to keep your detail features unpatterned and random. One strategy for ensuring randomness is to compile a list of every detail idea you have, like so:


You can then use a random number generator to randomly select an option to detail a particular area. But don't just use the list - vary and mix things up for the very best results.

It's important to note that these detailing techniques are applicable to any natural area, not just deltas, and so should be used liberally.
But with the detailing done, the delta, and indeed, the first city tile, is complete. Let's have a look at the finished product:


And that's it for this lesson.

As I said at the start of the lesson, several of you very kindly responded to my poll on what city tile we should develop next. Here are the results:

Tile A (to the north): 1 vote
Tile B (to the west): 7 votes
Tice C (to the south): 0 votes

So the overwhelming majority of you want to see the tile to the west of the first one, featuring the CBD, developed. That, therefore, is exactly what I'll do.
In the next lesson, we will start work on this city tile, by building the urban railways.

See you then,
Chris

[yochananmichael]

fantastic update Chris, well done. I particularly liked how you detailed the forest areas very nice indeed. I look forward to seeing the CBD tiles be developed in your next update.

[Terring7]

That's some very nice ideas and advices

[sxwrst]

This thread must be the single most instructive and inspiring I have ever come across. Your creations are simply wonderfull and you make it easy to grasp how to create them. After not having touched the game for atleast six months, I am going to reinstall SC4. You, sir, win 10 internets.

[Catalyst]

Hey Chris !

Great Mayor diary, I've learned a lot from your lessons, especially raising props in SC4 LE, using SC4 tool to TE lots and using MMP's. Thanks very much, I hope you'll soon reach the 500-posts mark.

I'm looking forward to the urban railways, and if you're going to create GLR-networks, you might want to have a look at the Fenced GLR Puzzle Pieces by cogeo found at the stex, it adds imo a lot of realism to the game, especially when the network runs through areas that do not have the same base texture as the GLR-tracks(parks, suburbs,ecc).

Are you going to make pedestrian areas (pedmalls or streets blocked from all traffic but pedestrians) where people will have to walk to get to work or will you make a haljackey-north-american-styled-CBD ?

Take your time, don't forget to study for the exams and again, great work!

MFG

[wardo]

Just want to say thank you for this thread and all the time and effort you put into it! There is so much useful information and inspiration within it has helped me tremendously with both, and everything is very well written. I can't wait for future lessons and projects. Keep it up!

[smileymk]

Hey guys. Now that my second year of university is finally over, I can at last get back to SC4 and this MD.

Whilst I've been away doing exams, however, this MD has hit a major milestone - a truly whopping 100,000 views.

That really is a significant achievement. And to top it off, we've managed to hit six figures whilst still in the Best Sellers section, which I also think is pretty significant.
It's also got me wondering whether any other MDs in SC4D's history have managed to amass 100K views whilst still in the Best Sellers section. If anyone could provide an answer to this, it would be very much appreciated. I'm quite curious...

Now, of course, there is only one reason why we've hit this milestone, and that is you, the readers of this MD. As you read this, you can rest assured that you have helped make a young statistics student from England a very proud man. Thank you.

I think that'll do with regard to blowing my own trumpet (although I hope you can understand it on this occasion) - let's get down to business:

yochananmichael: Thank you. I also like the forested areas, especially in the game summer - so much so that I'm thinking of trying to make the summer models non-seasonal for my side projects.

Terring7: Thanks.

sxwrst: Thanks, and welcome to SC4D. I'm proud to have inspired you to get back to SC4. (10 internets may be a little much for me to handle, but I'll do my best )

Catalyst: Thank you. In response to your suggestion about the fenced puzzle pieces, I haven't used them for this update, but may add them in the future. However, the tram network we're going to build is mostly going to run on roads, negating the need for the fences. It's also rare to see tram tracks fenced off in urban areas.
As for the CBD style, I'll most likely go for the pedestrian area approach, combined with plenty of small side streets placed in no real pattern, as I'm used to seeing.

wardo: Thank you. I'll certainly try to keep going for as long as possible.

And now, the main event:

Lesson 19 - Urban Railways

In this update, we'll be beginning work on the second city tile of Mapleford by constructing the heavy rail system.

Seeing how a main central station is planned for this tile, it makes sense to start there.
This seems straightforward enough - however, as we're in a dense urban area, it doesn't make much sense to have the railway lines running along the ground, as this would necessitate a large amount of level crossings, which would cause traffic chaos, or a large amount of flyovers/underpasses, which wouldn't look great either.
So instead we're going to use the NAM rail viaducts to run the railway through the CBD. That means that our main station has to work with these viaducts.

However, a main station needs to be big - at least 10 long platforms - and no suitable lot is available on the exchanges. So we're going to have to make our own in Lot Editor.

So let's load up Lot Editor and get to it. We're going to convert this office block lot into a 12-platform elevated through station:


An office block might sound like a strange choice for a station building, but this particular offering is a good size (large but not enormous), looks modern and features a glass panel entrance which is seen in a lot of modern station buildings. Crucially, it was also available - as much as I wanted an old Victorian-style building, there just weren't any available that were suitable - they were either of the wrong size or had unwanted extras attached to them.
Of course, the station building you choose is up to you - but it needs to be of about the same size as this office block.

Now, any station needs platforms, and so the next task is to get these put in.
At this point we need to make sure we avoid a common pitfall. We need to make sure that the platforms we put in are long enough. Many stations, although they look good, have platforms that are just too short for the trains serving them.
As an example, in the UK at rush hour, commuter trains often consist of up to 12 carriages, giving a total train length of 240-250m. That's 16 tiles, which means that these trains wouldn't fit into most SC4 stations.

So to ensure we can fit in long trains, I've gone with HSR station for the main platforms, and a smaller 4-platform version to put at the back for shorter trains.
The main prop is 14 tiles long, so we need to resize the office block lot on Lot Editor to fit in these platforms:


Since Lot Editor expands lots downwards, we need to move the station building and props back to the front of the lot:


It's vital that we position the platforms so that they line up with the NAM rail viadcuts - so to ensure this happens, we're going to add some concrete tile base textures where the platforms are to be sited, so that we can use the tiles to correctly position the platforms:


We can now finally add the main platforms, using the concrete tiles to position them correctly (the supports should be in the middle of the grid square), and move the office block so that it transitions nicely into the platform area:


With that done, let's put in the shorter platforms. We need to first create the prop descriptor:


After that, we can return to Lot Editor and place the new prop:


When placing this prop, we need to make sure that its entrance lines up with that of the main platform prop like so:


Now, you may have noticed that the short platforms extend beyond the current lot boundaries, so let's resize the lot and fix that right now:


The short platforms don't extend along the whole lot, so we need to add some NAM viaduct rail props to extend the track to the end of the lot:


All those exposed supports don't really add to the aesthetic value of the station, so let's pretty things up by adding arches underneath the lead-in viaducts we just built, and brick walling around the platforms:




We suppose that these features are remnants from a previous incarnation of the station. The arches, in particular, provide consistency, since these were the arches we used in the industrial area of the first city tile, and which we will use again.
If brick doesn't take your fancy, you can always go for concrete, steel or some other reasonable material for the walling. Play to your architectural style and you'll get very good results.

There's one crucial thing we need to do now. The platform props were designed for HSR and elevated rail, which are 15m high. The NAM rail viaducts, however, are 15.5m high, so the platform props need to be raised by 0.5 metres.
This can be done by selecting both props (select one, hold the CTRL key and then click on the other one), and then pressing CTRL+Up Arrow 5 times. Each CTRL-Up Arrow press raises the prop by 0.1m, so it's not hard to see why we use this key combination 5 times:


If you've done it right, small numbers will appear on the lot blueprint next to the props raised (circled in red above) showing the height of the props above ground.
And yes, this does mean that the platform props will technically be floating in mid-air, but it will be impossible to notice this in the game because the increase is so small, so we'll go with it.

With the main station features in place, it's time for some detailing.
We suppose that all of our main lines are electrified, so we need to add catenary masts to all of our outside tracks. We also need to add signals to all tracks at the end of platforms:


Don't forget to raise the props to 15.5m - you can use CTRL+SHIFT+Up Arrow to raise props by 1m increments, as well as pressing arrow keys whilst holding SHIFT to move props in 1m increments, and using the Duplicate Selected button to get the job done faster, and to get everything placed nicely in line.

A small but important addition is some fences in between the arches to prevent the space between the two back-most tracks becoming an ideal place for teenagers to do drugs, as well as helping to prevent people from getting onto the top of the arches or simply jumping off the platform:




On the other side, in between the two platform props, there's a little bit of empty space, so we need to fill it with something. A waste disposal area will do the job nicely:


This doesn't need to be overly elaborate - just a couple of skips, receptacles, garbage piles and a front gate will suffice.

The next step is to change the base textures to something more appropriate. Although the concrete tiles don't look too bad, they won't match the grey pavements I'm using at all. So I've retextured all of the areas where people will walk with a grey concrete tile texture, as well as a standard concrete texture for beneath the tracks:


Now, there's a little bit of space in between the arches and the main platforms, opposite the waste disposal area. Of course, there are several ways to fill this area - one such way is to turn it into a small shopping arcade, using the arches as shops:


Again, there's no need to go completely mental with this - a few benches, lamps and vending machines, with a news stand at the back, are the only things I've used here. I think that the 'keep it simple' strategy works well here.

Let's turn our attention to the back of the station. We've got a big wall here supporting the station, so we can detail the area by putting billboards on it, as well as a few benches and bins:


On the other side of the back entrance, we can put down more of the same. I've also added some bollards along the edge of the lot. This prevents vehicles from ending up on the station entrance area, as well as adding a nice edging to the station:


Here's the completed back end of the station, with all of the bollards and other details in place:


We can, and should, also detail the front of the station. Since this is a big station, a statue outside the front door won't look out of place:


Since I live in the UK, I've also put a British Rail station sign outside the front entrance. This, of course, is not necessary if your city is not based in the UK. It may be appropriate to have a sign depicting your local railway company outside of your station, however - whether or not one should be included, as well as what it should look like, are things that you need to find out yourself through research.

On either side of the front door, we can put a fountain and some benches. Bike racks would not be a bad idea either:


With that done, let's take a look at the completed front end of the station:


With that, we've finally completed our station lot. So we can now load up SC4 and place it, right?
Er, no. First things first, we've got to make an elevated version of the Bripizza rail crossover:


This is to allow us to provide a route to any platform at the main station from any line, providing easy turnarounds for trains terminating at the station.

The building of this lot is the crossover itself, which is no good to us because we can't raise buildings. What we can do, however, is to create a new decriptor defining the crossover as a prop, which we can raise. This is a simple task on Plugin Manager and is left as an exercise.
Having done this, we can delete the small lever props, replace the original building with a blank building, and place our new prop on top of a NAM rail viaduct piece:


A blank building can be found here. Note that you'll need to create a suitable decriptor for it to use it in Lot Editor. Defining it as a park and setting all of the effects at 0 will ensure that the building has no real effect on the game, which is what we want.
Note also that I've had to raise the crossover prop to 16 metres, so that it shows up over the NAM viaduct tracks. Again, this is a 0.5m height discrepancy which will be very hard to spot in the game, so we'll go with it.

That's not all. The main station and the elevated crossover have rail tracks running through them, so they need to be transit-enabled. The following pictures show the correct arrangements for the station and crossover lots respectively:




The transit switch properties also need to be set:




A note about capacities - the station has 100,000 capacity as this is the largest capacity SC4 Tool will allow you to set, and a big station obviously needs a big capacity. The crossover capacity was set to 62,500 as this is the capacity of railway lines under the NAM Ultra traffic simulator.

With that, our station and crossover lots are complete, so let's go into the game and build them.
It's easiest to start by placing the crossovers. We know that the station is 14 tiles long, and has 6 lines running through it, with a 1-tile gap between lines 4 and 5. So, having decided upon the location of our station, we can simply drag out the railway lines along the 14 tiles. The crossovers can then be placed along each track.
There has to be at least 1 tile of clear track in between the station and the crossovers on each line, on both sides, because the game will not allow two TE lots to be placed right next to each other - so the distance between the crossovers, in this case, should be 16 clear tiles:


Now we can place the main station in between the crossovers. We're going to have streets in between the crossovers and the station as well, so to achieve this, we place SAM-7 starter pieces in the gap between tracks 4 and 5, and on the immediate fringes of the station platform tracks, on both sides, like so:


The gaps can now be filled with the Rail over Street puzzle piece. Whilst doing this, be aware that you're hovering puzzle pieces in close proximity to transit-enabled lots. So to prevent crashes, be sure to work slowly and carefully, as well as in a close zoom - at least zoom 4. And, as always, save often:


Everything appears to be going smoothly. It certainly has been - but sure enough, before long we hit some major trouble:


Our station has been abandoned. But this is SimCity 4 - stations aren't supposed to abandon, so we're left wondering why this one has.
A quick query of the station reveals all:


The problem is fairly clear - because we used an office block, which is an RCI building, as the station building, the game thinks our station is an office block, and hence requires power and water. Those utilities aren't present, so the lot abandons.
Whilst an obvious fix here is simply to connect up the power and water supplies to the station, it doesn't solve the underlying problem here. A station should not abandon in the first place, so rather than taking the easy way out and connecting power and water as a stopgap measure, let's go a step further and modify the lot so that it isn't treated as an RCI lot, thus preventing abandonment.
To do this, we take the office block model, open up Plugin Manager, and create a new descriptor for the office block model defining it as a non-RCI building (I've gone for a landmark here, which will do just fine in nearly all cases):


We then need to open our station in Lot Editor and replace the old building with the new one:


Note that I've given the new building a descriptive name, and included the prefix 'SMK' (standing for SmileyMK, my screen name) in it. Using this naming convention makes it easy to identify the building. So to simplify your modding work, I strongly recommend that you devise your own consistent system for naming your mods, and stick to it. You'll benefit massively in the long run by doing this.

With that important point about naming conventions made, let's save the station lot and rebuild it in the game. Upon querying our rebuilt station, we see that a landmark query appears, proving that we have fixed the abandonment problem for good:


So now that our station actually works, let's develop the transport hub around it, starting with some short-term car parking and taxi ranks.
For the taxi ranks, we'll be using the HH Modular Parking Dropoff Lots.
Since this is a central station, most passengers using it won't have their cars with them, so we don't need huge car parks. Just a couple of small pick up/set down areas and a taxi rank will do:


Note the zebra crossing pieces in the middle, which are placed to allow pedestrians to reach the transport hub we're about to build.

Without further ado, let's build this transport hub. There are 3 components to this - a large underground station, multiple bus stops and a 4-platform GLR station:


Seeing as this is the heart of Mapleford's transport system, the underground station needs to be large and fairly impressive. The hub nature of the station is also the reason why I've gone for a 4-platform GLR station, as it allows trams to stable in the station between services.
The lots used here are the WTC Transit Hub for the underground station, and the BSC GLR Tramway Interchange Station for the GLR station, with catenary and ticket machines added in Lot Editor for added detail, and because tram systems tend to be powered by overhead catenary wires. Of course, these are not the only lots you can use.

The next step is to connect the GLR station to the streets the trams will spend most of their time on. This is done using GLR puzzle pieces, as shown below:


Note that you can't drag GLR-on-Street, and there isn't the space here for draggable GLR starters, hence the need to use puzzle pieces. SAM starter pieces also need to be placed where appropriate to preserve the asphalt street textures.

Now, this is a lesson on urban railways, not tram lines, so let's carry on developing the station forecourt. We're going to fill in the empty spaces by creating a concrete tile filler in Lot Editor, using the same base texture as that used on the station for a consistent effect:


We can then place this concrete tile filler in the empty areas of the station forecourt:


This is not perfect - we could retexture the underground station, and create smooth diagonal transition textures between the grey station concrete and the white GLR concrete. But that will have to wait for another lesson - certainly the latter improvement, which requires making our own textures.

And that's the front of the station complete. We can also put in some features outside the back entrance to the station, so let's do that now by adding another small bus terminal.
For this terminal, we're going to arrange bus stands in an echelon pattern, which provides variety, looks good and is realistic.
To achieve this, drag out 1-way roads in the pattern below, from left to right for LHD users, and right to left for RHD users, and then place bus stops along the diagonals:


To fill in the space in between the bus stands, the streets and the station, we're going to use these overhanging asphalt fillers.
Because of the echelon pattern used, it is necessary to create an additional filler lot that has triangular asphalt extenders going out of both sides of the lot, in order to ensure every bit of space is filled:




Admittedly, this looks quite bare and functional, but that is the nature of many modern transport terminals.

With that, the central transport hub of Mapleford is now complete, so let's turn our attention to the railway lines themselves.

The obivious place to start is with the approach tracks to the station. As you might imagine, station approaches vary from station to station depending on the location, geography and purpose of the station, as well as the typical traffic using the station, so there is no standard way to build tracks into a station.
However, there are some general guidelines which we can follow. For a main station like the one we've just built, we need to enable trains to reach any platform from any line, and vice versa, so that the station can be operated efficiently.
In addition, it's common to see adjacent tracks merge immediately after leaving the station to streamline the railway to as few tracks as possible, meaning fewer crossover points are needed, so we can incorporate that feature for some added realism.
Another thing we can do is to space out the points. Because we're working with elevated railway pieces, we don't have the lovely smooth curves we would be able to use with regular ground rail, so as a compromise, we should generally leave 1 or 2 tiles of plain track in between points, to create the impression that the approach is taken over a long distance and compensate for the sharpness of the curves.

I've used all of these techniques in the northern station throat. One final consideration is, of course, the number of lines leading out of the station, which will depend on the location and volume of traffic. Here, I've got 4 lines leading out of the station, which will split into a 4-track route and 2 2-track routes a little further down the line:


At the other end, things are a little simpler, because the plan only calls for a 4-track line with no splits heading out of the station, but we also need to curve the line southwest. Using the guidelines above, I was able to come up with this:


Note that I've included the nice wide curves in the middle of the approach pointwork to get the curve in quickly enough. Sharp curves are only fine for merging tracks - at all other times, we should use the wide radius curves for the best results.

Having completed the approaches to the main station, we can now focus on the lines themselves. Let's start with the southern main line, which will remain elevated since it runs through a dense urban area. It simply runs southwest, curving due south shortly before the end of the city tile:


Note that there is a 2-tile gap in between the straight tracks at the edge of the city tile. This is necessitated by the river just beyond the tile border, as the game does not allow the building of bridges right next to each other. Maintaining a 2-tile gap rather than a 1-tile gap also allows us to fill the space in between in a satisfying way, which we'll see a little later.

On the other side, there are 3 passenger routes to build. Let's start with the easternmost one, which is the line to the airport and beyond. We've got an existing connection from the airport city tile into the one we're currently working on, so let's start from there:


Except - where is it? We know that the line we want to build is elevated. We also know from our work on the first city tile that the line in question is north of the urban motorway, and is one of 3 railway lines going into this tile from the first one.
One of the road connections must be our railway line, since we use fake road connections to build neighbour connections with non-standard networks.

To find out exactly which connection is the one of interest, we need to go back into our first city tile and count the distance in tiles from the railway line to a fixed reference point, which in this case is the urban motorway:


We can see that the distance between the urban motorway and the railway line of interest is 11 tiles at the city tile boundary. Now, if we go back into the new city tile and count 11 tiles up from the urban motorway stub, sure enough, we find a road connection stub:


Having successfully identified the correct stub to build from, we can convert the road stub into a diagonal elevated heavy rail connection in the usual way:


We can then connect this line to the easternmost approach track north of the main station:


Notice that we haven't built any additional pointwork where the approach track branches off to become our new railway line. This is because the pointwork to take trains to the other lines already exists in the form of our station approach points. There's no need to add additional points which do the same thing, and so our lines can simply diverge as and when we want them to, with no fuss.
Remember that every piece of track you build should have a purpose - so building duplicate tracks and points where they're not needed is simply a waste of space, time and money.

The next line to build heads north, over the small section of river that is featured in this city tile. A river crossing obviously requires a bridge, so let's put that in now, with a curve immediately beneath it on an embankment:


Immediately after this, we need to construct a set of points. The straight branch will continue on to the main station, and the diverging branch will connect with a stub from the first city tile to become a freight line to the port. We're going to keep this pointwork on the embankment so that we can use the smooth points. However, the main line runs into dense urban territory pretty quickly afterwards, and so we need to transition to viaduct rail immediately after the points:


The railway lines can now be connected up. Let's do the freight line first:


You'll need to demolish and rebuild both the neighbour connection stub and the viaduct rail line where the freight line crosses underneath it to make a smooth connection.

Now, let's do the main passenger line:


Your attention might be drawn to the road in the top-left corner of the above picture. Let's take a closer look at it:


This road is simply there to mark out the route that the third and final northern railway line needs to take, so that I can decide where and how to separate this line from the other lines. We've used marking out positions with roads and single road tiles before, and it's a useful technique well worth practising.

So now we know where to build the final railway line, let's go ahead and build it. Since this is a busy line, it'll be a 4 track line, and since we'll be entering a less dense urban area, it makes sense to transition the railway back to ground level to reduce construction costs:


Another reason for transitioning to ground level is that we can take full advantage of the Real Railway Mod and place those smooth curves much closer together than we've been able to previously. The results, I think you'll agree, are fantastic.

Before we can extend this line any further, however, we need to build another freight line from the first city tile connecting it. Doing this required me to move the airport line a little bit to the north in order to fit in the freight curve whilst providing enough space for the urban motorway to curve to the south as planned:


This illustrates why it's best to build your transport networks first - it's a lot easier to make changes now than when you've got development everywhere.
This freight line continues at ground level to meet the westernmost line we just built. We connect it to the top line in the standard way - with ortho - FARR points:


Notice that we haven't connected this freight line to the bottom line - at least not yet. The bottom line will, in this city tile at least, be dedicated to suburban passenger trains. The top track will take express trains and freight - since all of the express trains will be stopping at the main station, they won't be moving quickly enough for the slower freight trains to become an issue.
In the next city tile to the west, we'll build a crossover taking the freight to the suburban line when we're far enough from the station for our express trains to have enough speed to need their own track. This is another example of not building more track than necessary.

Our plan now calls for a suburban station to be built at this point on the line.
The point about not building unnecessary things extends to stations, too. This station is only going to be served by suburban trains, which will run exclusively on the bottom railway line. So we only need to build platforms on this bottom line - i.e. we only need to build a 2-platform station rather than a 4-platform one. Building platforms for the top line would just be a waste, because they'd never be used.
There are several suburban stations out there, and the only requirements for a suitable example are that it is low-key and has platforms at least 6 tiles long. At 96m, a platform this size will comfortably fit a typical 4-car commuter train:


Also note the absence of approach points for this station, because they simply aren't needed. Westbound trains use the bottom track and the bottom platform, eastbound trains use the top track and the top platform. There's no variety in the routes the trains take at this point on their journey, so no route-changing tracks are required.

Of course, longer trains need longer platforms, but this will do just fine for suburban trains, which are typically short.
Note that we've provided an access road to this station branching off a main road, as is quite common in real life. We need to provide some additional facilities at this station - namely a car park and a bus stop on the main road:


That station looks pretty good. With that done, let's extend this railway route westwards, up the hill:


This looks good from a distance, but if you look carefully, you can notice a problem. Let's zoom in and have a look at it:


There is a small kink in the gradient of the railway line - a sharp transition between two grades. This is obviously not what we see in real life, and so for maximum realism we need to smoothen out this kink, as well as any others that occur.
This is best done with the God Mode Smoothen tool, at zoom 4, like so:


When done, rebuild the railway line, and the kink should disappear:


We also don't want any small humps or dips in our railway lines, so we need to take care to identify these, especially around hills, and level them out with single road tiles:


The end result is a lovely smooth railway line that justifies the effort we've put into building it properly:


The railway network for our second city tile is complete at last - but we're not done yet. We've still got to electrify our passenger lines.
On plain ground-level track, this is nothing we haven't done before:




On orthogonal 2-track viaduct rail, we can use the industrial arch catenary lots we made in a previous lesson to get the job done:




On wider lines, such as our station approaches, however, things get more complicated.
For the plain track leading into the station, we can simply combine 2 arches and the double catenary in Lot Editor to produce a catenary lot for 4 elevated tracks:


After transit-enabling this lot, we can place it in the game at the standard interval of 3 tiles. You'll need to demolish the existing viaducts to place the catenary lots, before rebuilding the viaduct:


Note that we've had to demolish the viaduct curve on the fourth line to fit in a 2-track catenary lot. Fortunately, this does not cause problems, as the viaduct curve can simply be rebuilt afterwards to complete the look:


What does cause problems, however, is when we try to install our new transit-enabled catenary lots along the station approach.
Because we have to rebuild the viaducts after placing these catenary lots, we have to hover puzzle pieces dangerously close to TE lots. This is OK when dealing with straight track, as that puzzle piece is a 1x1 piece and so is easy to keep away from TE lots, as long as you're careful. But when dealing with points and curves, which are 2x1 pieces, a game crash is virtually inevitable.
So to make sure we're able to electrify the station approach, we need to create another lot in Lot Editor which isn't transit-enabled:


We can then place this lot on the station approach. Whilst this leaves one side of the catenary unsupported unless an arch is present, we have little alternative:




The catenary masts should be placed every 2-3 tiles, as per usual, as appropriate, where they will fit. Use common sense here, and don't put catenary masts in the way of train tracks, for example.

We can now fill in the gaps in the arches with plain industrial arch lots to get a good look for our station approaches:


At this point you may be wondering what we're going to do about diagonal elevated lines. Unfortunately, there aren't any arch-style lots like the ones used here for diagonal networks, so we'll have to just pretend the catenary is there for now.
So let's finish off the network by adding signalling. As long as you remember what we discussed about signalling in Lesson 15, you should be able to signal the network here:


And with the signalling in place, we are done. Let's take a look at the work we've done in this lesson:


That's a substantial railway network we've just built. It's a fitting way to end a long and involved lesson.

In the next lesson, we'll be continuing our work on the transport network by building the motorways - both urban and fully-fledged.

See you then,
Chris

[Indiana Joe]

Fantastic relotting and rail lines.     The RRW viaducts will eventually be updated eventually.  I'm sure Willy wants to change the curve geometry, which involves a lot of modeling work, but I think there might be some temporary, interim textures put out in the meantime

Also, watching your step-by-step LE work gave me an idea that I'm surprised you didn't get.  Try putting NAM viaduct props inside the station itself, raised up a tiny bit, so they hide the Maxis rails in the station model.

[APSMS]

A very nice lesson. My only criticism would be that you didn't change the transit entry costs for the first station. This is necessary because travel time inside transit enabled lots is zero, and weird commutes result with zero entry cost, because Sims will use the station as a short cut, reducing capacity as well.

Other than that, very well detailed and thought out.

[smileymk]

Hey guys.

Indiana Joe: Thank you. Like all the features I'd like to see added to the NAM, I'm sure that the rail viaducts will be brought up to standard in time. It's good to learn of the possibility of interim textures, but don't feel pressured into releasing them. I, along with most people here, understand that it takes a lot of time and effort to complete this work, and will happily give the NAM Team the time they need.
Your suggestion for improving the station is a good one, but I'm sorry to say that it didn't work when I tried it. For some reason, the station model seems to hide other models within it, including the NAM rail viaducts. The only alternative I can think of is to use the gmax file for the station, which is available on the STEX, to remodel the station, but that task is beyond the level of this project and is also a lot of work to fix a small cosmetic issue.

ASPMS: Thanks for your feedback. I wasn't aware of the 'shortcutting' problem previously, so didn't understand the need for a positive entry cost.
In response to your comment, I've raised the entry cost value for the main station to 0.0069, as shown below:


(The choice of entry cost value is taken from this list of recommended values, for those who are wondering.)

Right then, it's time to build some motorways:

Lesson 20 - Urban Motorways

In this lesson, we'll be extending the urban motorway network of Mapleford, and building some junctions on it, as well as starting work on the main motorway through the city, which passes through the current city tile. We've already covered the general guidelines regarding urban motorway construction, particularly those regarding compactness and the ability to build these routes to a slightly lower standard than full-blown motorways, so let's get right into it and start off by curving the existing stub of urban motorway from the first city tile to the south:


Immediately after this, we need to construct a T-interchange, with the existing motorway continuing south to serve the port and a branch to the west serving the city centre and connecting to the main motorway, a section of which we'll build later.
Since we are building an urban motorway through what will be a dense urban area, this junction needs to be kept as tight as possible. However, we should still be using reasonably smooth curves and ramps.
The easiest and most attractive way to do this is to use the prefab Project Symphony T-Interchange, found in the Prefabs tab ring at the bottom of the Highways menu:


This gives us compactness and smoothness, which is what we're after. We do lose acceleration lanes, which we would like to have, but we can get away with not having them on an urban motorway, again due to the need for compactness.
Make sure you place the right version of this interchange - specifically, the L2 x L2 version. We need to keep the motorways elevated in order to get them over the many streets of urban Mapleford efficiently.
If you arrive at the T-interchange preview but see the wrong version previewed, simply rotate the piece using the End key enough times and you should see the correct version appear eventually.

Let's extend both of the branches from this interchange, starting with the straight one to the south. At first, this simply requires the dragging of a straight section of elevated Project Symphony highway:


Near the southern edge of the city tile, however, the plan calls for us to terminate this section of motorway at a flat roundabout, connecting with a single-carriageway road.
Let's start by building the roundabout itself. The surface road in question is the road heading west from the port that we started during our work on the first city tile. We can find out where it enters the new city tile by using the counting tiles method outlined in Lesson 19.
After identifying the correct road, drag it out a little bit beyond the planned point of intersection with the motorway, and mark this point using single road tiles:




Then place 2x2 one-way road curves with a 1-tile gap at the ends connecting to the surface road, and a 2-tile gap at the other ends, like so:


Be aware whilst doing this that the smooth one-way curve pieces are directional, so be careful to place the pieces so that traffic moves around the roundabout in the correct manner. The curve piece previews feature directional arrows to show you the direction of travel, so make sure these are pointing clockwise if you have LHD, anti-clockwise otherwise.

We can now connect up the curves using one-way roads, being careful to drag them in the correct direction, and lay down the roads leading out from the roundabout - regular roads to the left and right, and an avenue stub at the top to connect to the motorway:


At this point, we could simply drag ground-level Project Symphony from the avenue stub to complete the junction, but since this particular interchange will be used by numerous lorries heading for the port, we're going to add a slip lane from the motorway to the eastbound surface road, so that the lorries avoid having to negotiate the roundabout.
To do this, we're going to make use of the RHW. On the right-hand side of the motorway, place an RHW-6S Type E1 ramp, leaving a 1-tile gap between this piece and the avenue stub to allow space for the slip lane to run past the roundabout. On the other side of the motorway, we can simply place an RHW-4 Starter Piece as no fancy ramps are needed here:


We use the RHW-6S ramp as this allows us to put in a short deceleration lane for added realism. Even though we can get away with omitting deceleration lanes on urban motorways in certain situations, like T-interchanges, we should still build short deceleration lanes when it's practical to do so.

The next step is to connect this slip lane with the surface road. We're going to do this by replacing a short stretch of the road with RHW-2 and adding a Type B1 ramp like so:


In order to achieve the best result, we need to connect the RHW-2 stretch to the road in the right way.
Notice that there is a 1-tile stretch of road poking out of the roundabout. The most visually pleasing way to connect this stub to the RHW-2 ramp is to drag RHW-2 into the road stub:


On the other side, extend the RHW by 1 tile, and then connect the road to it:


You can see that this gives an attractive result. The road connections are now complete, so it's time to focus on the motorway approach to the junction, starting with the deceleration lane for the slip road we just built.
On a full-blown motorway, we'd have a good few tiles of deceleration lane. But things are very different on urban motorways. Due to the need to keep everything as compact as possible, we need to keep the deceleration lane short - and that means placing a RHW-4 to 6S cosmetic transition with block markings on lane 1 immediately after the ramp piece:


Note that we used the cosmetic transition here, as this provides the prototypical short dash markings that mark the exit lane in many countries. Be aware that this particular transition is the first piece in the Cosmetic Transitions tab ring of the Highways menu - it is not in the Width Transitions ring.
There is a gap in the exit lane markings between the transition and the start of the slip road. This needs to be filled with an RHW-6S Lane 1 Block Markings cosmetic piece, found in the 2-tile Cosmetic Pieces tab ring:


We also placed a left-right arrow piece (found in the 1-tile cosmetic pieces tab ring) 3 tiles from the roundabout for added realism. As tempting as it is, do not place a cosmetic piece any closer to the roundabout than this, as doing so will cause the first tile of motorway, which is an RHW-4 - avenue transition piece, to glitch out, resulting in your having to rebuild most of the interchange to restore order.

The junction itself is now finished. We simply need to connect the RHW up with the Project Symphony forming the main carriageways. However, there is a small height discrepancy between the RHW-4 and ground-level Project Symphony, so this isn't a connection we can make just by dragging.
Instead, we first have to use RHW-4 starter pieces to create stubs that cover a full grid square:


We now go into the Project Symphony transitions tab ring and find the Symphony - RHW-4 Bridge Connector piece, then place it next to the RHW-4 stubs to create the transition to Project Symphony:


You might remember using this piece when we built urban motorway bridges in the first city tile to correct the height discrepancy between ground-level PS and the RHW-4 used for the bridges. The idea is exactly the same here, and as with the bridges, you need to be careful in placing this piece the right way round - getting this wrong could easily lead to you having to rebuild large parts of that roundabout we just built.
Ensuring correct orientation is pretty simple, however - you can see the slope, and the low end should connect to the RHW.

Having placed this transition piece, it's a simple matter to raise the motorway with a nice ground-elevated extended transition to finish the job:


Normally, we'd raise the motorway more gradually on an embankment and transition to elevated with an on-slope piece, but building embankments in a dense urban area takes up valuable space, so in this situation, we need the concrete transition.

That beautiful transition completes the roundabout terminus:


With the southern branch from the T-interchange finished, our attention turns to the other branch, which runs to the west.
At first, everything is straightforward - we extend elevated Project Symphony out from the T-interchange. But we soon run into trouble:


The rail viaducts are in our way. As if that wasn't bad enough, the plan calls for us to curve the motorway to the north and build a junction in the approximate area marked by the circle of road in this picture:


To make sure we route the motorway with enough space to fit everything in, it's easiest to build the junction first.
This particular interchange was originally planned to be another roundabout connecting to 4 surface roads, but to save space I decided to build an extended diamond covering the 2 western roads, which then combine to link to the 2 eastern roads.
Let's build this link road first. Start by constructing an avenue FLUP under the railway line. On the left of this, place a standard avenue roundabout, and on the right, extend the avenue by a few tiles:


To split the right avenue into 2 roads, we first place a 3-way AVE-4 x ARD-3 roundabout, found in the Avenue Intersections tab ring (rotate the piece if the 4-way version appears, and don't confuse it with the turbo roundabout). On the ARD-3 branch, we convert to road using TuLEPs. On the straight AVE-4 branch, we convert to road by first transitioning to AVE-2, then to road, like so:


At this point, a bit of housekeeping is necessary. We need to move the rail catenary and signals so that the masts aren't too far apart (i.e. more than 3 tiles) and don't obstruct the signals:


Notice that the signals covering the 2 middle tracks can't be obstructed by the double catenary masts, and so we can place them wherever we like. This is a useful thing to bear in mind when placing signals, as it can make your life easier.

Moving on, the other 2 roads come out of the roundabout to the left - an avenue leading out diagonally southwest, and a road leading out to the west, connected to the roundabout with a single-tile avenue stub:


We then run elevated Project Symphony over this avenue and road, leaving a 3-tile gap in between the motorway and roundabout to provide space for the junction, and transitioning to ground level immediately to the south of the avenue so we can get under those rail viaducts:


To provide the surface road to motorway connection, we run one-way roads parallel and adjacent to the motorway, through the road and avenue, on both sides. We also add TuLEP slip lanes where appropriate to smoothen out certain turns:


Notice that we don't add a slip lane from the road to the southbound motorway, as traffic taking this route can simply use the avenue to get to the motorway. Hence facilitating the turn from the road is pointless and unnecessary, and is not worth doing.

Let's now build the ramps at the southern end of the junction. As with the roundabout, we should include short deceleration lanes, and I've also included a MIS slip lane from the northbound motorway to the westbound avenue to save vehicles from a hairpin 135-degree turn, connecting to the avenue using a one-way road stub. Here is the layout of this part of the junction:


That's the southern ramps done - time to move to the northern ones. We start these by placing MIS starter pieces, and then dragging these into our one-way connector roads:


The MIS now needs to be brought up to the level of the main carriageway on both sides. We can use the Flex 2-level height transition to provide a lovely smooth climb up to the elevated level. Place one on both sides, and the RHW-2 preview will transform into a beautiful MIS transition. Stabilise the ramps by placing L2 MIS fillers at the top end of the ramps:


Those filler pieces are important, by the way, because the next step is to place L2 RHW-6S Type D1 ramps above them:


Failing to place the stabilising filler pieces will cause your MIS FLEX transitions to glitch out when you place the ramp piece.

At this point, we need to address the fact that the ramps are RHW pieces, and the carriageway south of it is elevated Project Symphony.
At the time of writing this lesson, I attempted to drag this transition, but could not do it, leading me to believe that it could not be done. In fact, it can. The correct technique is outlined in the prelude to Lesson 21 (the next lesson, a few posts down from this one) under the heading Update to Lesson 20, so go and have a look at it.

What I will now present to you is how I constructed this transition at the time I made the content for this lesson. Think of it as an alternative technique.
Firstly, clear 3 tiles of space between the ramps and the carriageway:


Now go into the 15m Avenue puzzle pieces tab ring and find the elevated avenue-highway connector piece. Place one on the last tile of the carriageway, and another immediately after it, rotated 180 degrees, in between the first one and the RHW ramps:


The fact that this connector piece covers the full length of a tile provides us with this nice transition. Yes, we lose a bit of the hard shoulder, but that's perfectly acceptable for an urban motorway.

Having learnt how to transition between elevated Project Symphony and L2 RHW-4, let's finish off the ramps by extending the elevated RHW-6S over the railway line, transitioning to L2 RHW-4 to end the deceleration lanes, and then back to elevated Project Symphony using the method above:


Remember to move the rail catenary so that the poles aren't too far apart and there are poles next to the flyover.

This flyover completes the junction:


Let's now finish our urban motorway network in this tile by connecting to the existing motorway, and extending it.
On the south side of the junction we just built, we need to demolish the rail viaducts where the motorway crosses under them, and then connect to the junction using 45-degree smooth curves, the ground-elevated extended transition, and the bridge connector to transition to RHW-4 for the junction itself:


The viaducts can then be rebuilt:


We can pretty up the flyover on the left a little bit. The industrial arch set we're using here happens to include a lot designed to take the arches over an avenue. An urban motorway is the same width, so this lot should work just as well here.
However, in order to provide correct catenary spacing, we need to add a single catenary mast to this lot before we can use it here. This requires us to get the Lot Editor out again:


We can then place this lot, along with the original arch over avenue lot, to give a nice continuation of the arches over the motorway:


This completes the connections on the south side of the diamond junction. On the north side, the motorway enters what will be a suburban area. Since an elevated motorway running through a suburb will look ridiculous, we're going to transition to ground level using the standard embankment and on-slope piece method, before continuing the motorway with ground-level Project Symphony highway:


And that completes our urban motorway network in this city tile, so let's move on to the full-blown motorway to the west, running around the base of the hill.
There are no junctions planned for this motorway in this city tile. This is mainly because a big interchange connecting to the urban motorway is planned for just north of the current city tile, and another important junction is planned to the west. These two interchanges negate the need for more junctions.
Remember that the most important rule of region construction is to build the region as if it were one huge city tile. That means that we have to build the motorway through a region, not a collection of city tiles, and so we only place junctions in the region where they are needed, and suitably far apart (i.e. absolutely no less than 1 mile (100 tiles), and ideally no less than 2 miles (200 tiles)). If that means building the motorway through a city tile without putting any junctions in it, so be it. We lose the ability of in-game traffic to use the motorway in that city tile, but we gain a lot of increased realism from a regional perspective, so it's well worth it, at least in my opinion.

Having justified the lack of junctions, let's build the motorway. Because of the nearby important junctions, we're going to use the RHW-8C, as opposed to the RHW-6C which I'd normally use, to provide additional capacity on this busy section of motorway.
We'll start by placing an RHW-8C Starter Piece at the western end of the planned course, and extending the RHW westwards to the edge of the city tile. Remember to place the RHW-8C Neighbour Connector on the last tile before the edge of the city tile to make the connections work:


The motorway is planned to curve around the base of the hill and then run north to meet the urban motorway in the next city tile to the north. So we need to curve the motorway northwards.
As we're building a full-blown motorway, a simple dragged curve, or even a 45-degree smooth curve, will not do. We need to do what we do with railways and go from orthogonal to FA-RHW before going to diagonal.
However, in order to preserve the RHW-8C override when we place the curve pieces, we first need to drag out the curve. Because the RHW-8C is a 3-tile network dragged with a 1-tile tool, dragging a curve is a more involved process than it is for a simple road. You need to drag out RHW exactly as shown in the following pictures, in the exact order depicted:










We now need to extend the diagonal section of motorway so that enough tiles of diagonal RHW-8C are present to prevent reversion to RHW-2 when we demolish this dragged curve to make way for the smooth curve pieces:


This would normally be the point where we take out that ugly dragged curve and put the beautiful smooth FA-RHW curve pieces in its place. As you can see, however, the diagonal section of motorway is currently very bumpy. Needless to say, this looks pretty horrific and needs to be fixed.
The fix is very similar to that used to fix the kink in the railway gradient. It requires smoothing the terrain using the God Mode Smoothen tool, complemented with well-placed stretches of rail to help out. We can also use single road tiles to create cuttings or embankments, keeping the motorway level over bumpy terrain, if needed:


After the smoothing work is complete, reconstruct the motorway. You should have a much smoother surface:


Gorgeous. Let's get back to finishing that curve. Demolish the dragged curve and place an RHW-8C Ortho-FA Short Curve, followed by an RHW-8C FA-Diagonal Curve, in its place:


That's more like it. Now we need to construct another curve back to orthogonal RHW, taking the motorway to the north.
Again, we first need to drag out the curve, and this is done by dragging exactly as shown in the pictures below, in exactly the same order:












Then extend the orthogonal RHW to provide enough tiles of RHW-8C to preserve the override:


Finally, demolish the dragged curve and put the FA smooth curve pieces in its place:


By now it should be clear that making curves with wide RHW networks is a purely mechanical task, the hardest part of which is actually knowing what to do. Once you know what to do, it's easy.
As with any mechanical procedure, the only way to get good at it is to practice, so what are you waiting for?

Having hopefully got your RHW curve-building practice in, let's extend the motorway northwards until we hit this railway line:


Given that the railway almost certainly came before the motorway, a motorway flyover is the appropriate way of getting the motorway over this obstruction.
We've built RHW flyovers before, but not with the RHW-8C. This width requires the use of the new Flex On Slope pieces to build the flyover.
First, construct 3x3 7.5m embankments on both sides of the railway line using the ground lifters, in line with the motorway. Then place Level 1 On Slope Flex Transitions (found in the Flex Transitions tab ring of the Highways menu), with the preview facing the railway and the cursor positioned as shown here:


You'll need 3 transitions on each side, because the RHW-8C is a 3-tile network.

Now, on each side of the flyover, directly adjacent to the Flex transitions, place an RHW-8C starter piece, and watch the 6 RHW-2 flyovr stubs transform into 2 RHW-8C flyover stubs:


We can then construct proper smooth approaches to the flyover on both sides using the rail tool, and then simply drag out the flyover and approaches with the RHW tool:


As with the FLUP underpass earlier on, the rail catenaries need to be moved so that there is a mast immediately before and after the bridge:


We can now finish the motorway by extending it to the edge of the city tile. Don't forget the neighbour connector piece:


With that, we've finished building the actual motorways of this city tile. It's now time to decorate them.

As you can imagine, motorways produce a lot of traffic noise. In urban areas, with houses near the tarmac whose occupants won't take too kindly to this noise, this represents a major problem.
The solution? Soundwalls. These walls are often seen running alongside motorways in urban areas, and are built specifically to reduce the amount of noise that reaches nearby buildings.
So since the motorways we've just built run through urban areas, it makes sense to complement them with soundwalls.
There are many soundwall sets on the STEX and LEX (I'm using the dark wood offering in this set), and which set you use is a matter of personal taste. The walls you choose should be straight, though. This might sound obvious, but some sets contain wavy walls.

Once you've found a good soundwall set, it's time to put it to use. All sets are used in a similar way. For plain sections of motorway, there will doubtless be straight and walls, which go alongside straight orthogonal sections of motorway:


There are usually straight wall lots that are longer than 1 tile - this particular set has 1, 2 and 3 tile lots. Use these longer lots to speed up the construction process.
Another important point specific to the soundwall set I'm using is that the wall is not in the middle of the tile. Therefore we can either place these walls close to the motorway or far from it. Since this is a full-blown motorway running through largely suburban areas, I've gone for the latter option.

Problems start to arise when we deal with embankments. Soundwall lots are generally not slope-tolerant, so we can't place them along the side of the embankments. Placing them parallel to the embankments on ground level is wasting space.
In actual fact, since a motorway on an embankment is above normal ground level, it is above the level of most buildings. Hence it's going to be very hard for a significant amount of noise to reach these buildings, as the sound would have to go down through the tarmac. So we can simply omit soundwalls along embankments:


This particular set has a nice end piece that can be used to end the wall in a nice-looking way.

When it comes to curves, most soundwall sets have orthogonal-diagonal transition pieces, as well as plain diagonal pieces, that enable us to get around bends. On a regular motorway, to keep the walls looking as attractive as possible, it's best to use as few transitions as possible:


Diagonals are very simple - just use the plain diagonal lots. Like with the orthogonal lots, many sets feature longer diagonal wall lots, which can help get the walls built quicker.

There is a fair bit of empty space in between the soundwalls and the tarmac on curved and diagonal sections of motorway. This space can now be filled in with grass fillers:


That covers soundwalls for regular motorways. Urban motorways are similar, but with one key difference.
On the set I'm using, because the walls are not centred, we can build them the other way round to the way we used for the proper motorway - i.e. place the walls right next to the motorway. This gives a more compact effect, which suits urban motorways perfectly:


On regular motorways, we kept the number of orthogonal-diagonal transition pieces as small as possible. However, on an urban motorway, compactness is everything, and so in this case we're happy to use as many transition pieces as we need to keep the footprint of the motorway as small as possible. This means that the soundwall arrangement for urban motorway curves is very different to that for normal motorway curves:


In addition, just like soundwalls are not needed on raised embankments, they're not needed on elevated sections either, so we can end the soundwalls at the start of the transition to elevated motorway:


That covers the basics of soundwalls, so let's move on to another method of decorating our motorways - signs:




We've covered use of basic road signs before, so I won't go into detail on this. What we haven't covered is what happens when we want to put a sign somewhere, but there is a soundwall in the way.
Rather than leaving random gaps in our soundwalls to fit the signs in, let's keep things efficient by combining the appropriate soundwalls with the appropriate signs in Lot Editor:








Once we place these lots in the game, we get some very nice results:








Another thing we can do is to combine soundwalls with traffic generators, enabling us to create the impression of a well-used motorway whilst still keeping the noise away from buildings:




And that's that. The motorway network for the second tile of Mapleford is now finally complete.

In Lesson 21, we'll be building the GLR lines through the outer industry and suburbs of the second city tile.

See you then,
Chris

[Catalyst]

hey smileymk, great lesson!
I really like the picture with the extended railway arches over the urban motorway.
The use of the noise-barriers is also very clever, from a distance you would probably not even notice that you transitioned from PS to RHW for the roundabout/flyover because it looks so compact as opposed to the generously constructed RHW-8 which has a more suburban feel, like you said.
Too bad the sound walls don't use the same base texture as the RHW (35ea4150 & 35ea4100 in the LE)

[mgb204]

Some great tips for RHW building here, I always admire the amount of planning that must go into your transport infrastructure.

[thebagleboy]

So after a nice long break for exams and finishing off projects, I'm glad to return to Simcity again. And what's better is the two very well written posts. 
I especially have to applaud just how well the mail rail station looks. Inspired me to give it a shot, and now I know how it could actually happen. By the way, Maxis El-HWY can connect to L2 RHW by simply dragging the RHW onto it.
Good work on the posts and congradulations on 100`000 views!

sidenote: is that a LHD I spy there 

[romualdillo]

Wow, great work and great lessons!!!! I've never done such a complicated transport system, but if I someday do, this will be an excellent tutorial!! 

[smileymk]

Hello everyone.

Catalyst: Thanks. I like that arch picture too, it looks cool and shows how small additions can make a huge difference.
As for the sound walls, it's a simple task to change the base texture to RHW. The hard part is transit-enabling it, and making the wall an overhanging prop so that it can be extended into adjacent tiles, which is necessary to get around the game's ban on placing a TE lot on the tile in front of another one.
It is a shame, as being able to put soundwalls directly on RHW would create a very effective 'compact' look.

mgb204: Thank you. The transport infrastructure is planned before starting the project - but turning the plan into reality takes a lot of careful thought during construction, especially when complex things like interchanges are concerned. Sometimes it's necessary to deviate from the initial plan, and even when it isn't, it's still necessary to carefully consider how to build what I'm building.

thebagleboy: Thanks. I've also been able to return to SC4 off the back of exams and moving out of my uni house, which is very welcome.
The main station was tricky to create, but I'm glad you like it.

By the way, Maxis El-HWY can connect to L2 RHW by simply dragging the RHW onto it.

As it turns out, you're right. I tried it whilst making the lesson and it didn't work, leading me to believe it couldn't be done. But in actual fact, I just didn't do the dragging correctly. I've posted an update to Lesson 20 below showing the correct technique, and will edit Lesson 20 itself to point readers to this update.

Is that a LHD I spy there?

It is indeed. I am from England, after all.

romualdillo: Gracias, señor. I wish you the very best of luck in your transport efforts, if and when the time comes.

The replies part of this update is now finished. Before I can start Lesson 21, however, there is an important update to Lesson 20 to do first:

Update to Lesson 20

In Lesson 20, I stated that it was not possible to create a transition from elevated Project Symphony highway to L2 RHW-4 by dragging the PS into the RHW, implying that it was not possible to drag that transition at all. I then proceeded to outline a workaround.

However, as thebagleboy correctly pointed out, and my later experiments confirmed, the transition can in fact be dragged.

The secret is to drag the RHW into the first tile of the Project Symphony (and no further), not the other way round, and to use L2 RHW-4 starter pieces to help stabilise the RHW, as shown below:


If done correctly, you should obtain a much better looking transition than what we had before:



Lesson 20 will have been edited to point you to this update by the time that you read this. My thanks go once again to thebagleboy for making me aware that the transition in question could be dragged.

End of Update to Lesson 20

With that important update made, let's get back to business.

Lesson 21 - ELR and GLR

In this lesson we will be building the GLR and el-rail routes through the suburbs and industry of the CBD city tile we've been working on of late.
Note that we will not be doing the underground routes through the CBD in this lesson, nor will we be doing the central tram line. This is because tram lines are very different to GLR metro lines, and because we're going to do the CBD streets first, fitting the underground stations around them as per real life.

The first thing we're going to build is an interchange station on the southern edge of the suburbs. Because of its location, we'll need to go underground immediately after the station, and so the station itself needs to be sunken.

Ordinarily, this wouldn't cause us too many issues - we create a 15m depression (15m being the height nearly all sunken GLR stations in existence are designed to work with), place the station in the depression, and create a smooth transition to normal ground level on one side. But here, when we try to create the depression, this happens:


This has happened because the height of the terrain at this location is less than 15m above the game's sea level, causing the game to automatically fill the terrain below sea level with water.
Clearly we can't run our metro line through water, but we need a 15m height difference in order for the sunken station to look right.
In this case, the terrain turned out to be 6m above sea level, so the solution here is to create a 5m depression surrounded by a 10m embankment. The embankment comes first, because we have a 10m ground lifter available to us:


Note that this embankment is 6 tiles wide - 2 tiles for the GLR tracks, a tile either side for the depression slopes, and a tile either side of that for the connecting streets. The length depends on the station - here we needed to leave 5 tiles for the station, plus extra tiles for the GLR-underground transition and GLR starter pieces.

It should be fairly obvious what the next step is - use the 15m hole digger to create the depression for the GLR tracks, and the rail tool to create a smooth transition to ground level at the northern end of the depression:


The station can now be placed. Any 2-tile wide 15m sunken station will do here, so long as the platforms are at least 5 tiles long. At the southern end, place two rural hillside GLR-underground transitions to take the GLR underground:


Currently, the embankment ends sharply on the southern side. That means that the underground lines would have to nosedive in order to fit under the terrain.
This is not at all realistic, so let's smooth out the southern edge of the embankment to provide enough clearance to allow the underground tunnels to descend gradually:


Let's now take care of access to the station. A couple of streets and bus stops will do the job here:


Note that the streets and bus stops are on embankment level.

Let's now concentrate on the GLR tracks to the north.
One line will head to the left, running sunken under a main road before surfacing to run through an industrial estate. The other will head northeast through the suburbs.
This requires us to extend the depression using single road tiles, place rural GLR starter pieces immediately after the station, and drag out the approaches:


The points are included because this is an interchange between a north-south line and an east-west line, so the two lines need to cross over each other. When the time comes to build the underground lines, we'll include some more points south of the station to complete the crossover.

This station is in a suburban area, so will mainly be used by commuters heading into central Mapleford in the morning, and back home in the evening. We should therefore add a car park near the station to allow commuters to drive to the station from their homes and back. I've put this car park at the bottom of the embankment, so I've also added some stairs (available here) to visually provide a route to the station:


To finish off the station, let's pretty up all of the embankment and depression slopes with retaining walls, suitably chosen so that they are appropriate for a residential area:


But there's a problem here - the fences and trees provided with the retaining walls I'm using crash into the station bridge and stairs. We can't be having this, so we need to create a modified straight wall piece in Lot Editor that has the fence and trees removed:


Once this lot is complete, put it in place of the offending original walls. Admittedly, the gap in the fencing is noticeable, but it's a lot better than having fencing crash into the bridge:


Finally, we need to make the station accessible to pedestrians. The easiest way to do this realistically is to add a Ped Mall bridge at the north end of the station and rebuild the GLR tracks like so:


Of course, we need to place a mass transit station next to one end of the Ped Mall to activate it, and so one of our bus stops will have to be moved accordingly:


That's the first station of the lesson built. Let's continue by extending the north-south line. Immediately, we have two railway lines to cross. Because one of these is a FARR line, we can't drag elevated rail over it, so we have to go underground instead and use a tube line to cross the railway.
Normally, we'd build a smooth cutting down to about 12m and place a hillside GLR-underground transition, but we're still on low-lying terrain here, so doing that will result in water appearing, like we saw at the start of the lesson.
So instead, we have to place a lot to do the job. You might remember that we made such a lot in Lesson 9, Part 4, and we're going to put it to good use here:


Things now get complicated. We need to place a station immediately after the railway, run the metro line across the urban motorway which is a few tiles to the east, and build another station before the line leaves the city tile.
The easiest way to do this is to build the last station first - i.e. the last station before the edge of the city tile, as this makes it easier to pick an appropriate route for the metro line.
This station is sandwiched in between the edge of the city tile and the urban motorway, so it's got to be elevated - there isn't any room for an embankment. We will also need to demolish any soundwalls that are in the way:


The elevated rail crossing over the urban motorway can simply be dragged. We now need to add the usual amenities for a suburban metro station - street access, a bus stop and a car park:


Try to keep the access streets a little bit away from the motorway - we're going to be putting houses on these roads, the residents of which will appreciate a tile or two of separation from the heavy traffic. Also remember to leave space for the soundwalls, like I've done above.

This station is now finished, so we can build the transition down from elevated to underground. First create a nice smooth embankment to ground level, and place the transition lot immediately afterwards at the bottom, like so:


In this case, I had to move the power lines to get the embankment in. This should not be an issue - just remember to maintain a spacing of at least 7 tiles between pylons.

Going back to transport, let's replace the soundwalls we demolished to make way for the station:


We can now get the subway tool out and connect everything up - due to the space constraints, we can't build any more transitions. Be sure to drag out 45-degree curves for a more realistic route - don't just drag a 1-tile 90-degree curve as it will look ridiculous:


The station immediately after the railway line now needs building. Place it somewhere that leaves room for the metro line to curve, and doesn't force us to place houses right next to the railway line:


And yes, there should be a car park there, but it escaped my mind at the time of construction. I'll build it when we come to develop this part of town.

With the north-south line now complete, let's build the east-west line that runs out of the first station we built.
This route runs through an industrial area that extends to the edge of the city tile and beyond. I normally like to use elevated rail instead of GLR in industrial estates, because I think it fits in better with all the industrial lots and details.
However, immediately after the GLR line from the first station surfaces, we run into the main motorway. This is an RHW-8C, which doesn't cross-link with elevated railway. So we have to stick with GLR in this case, using subway to get under the motorway, as going elevated and then going back down again will look utterly daft:


On the other side of the motorway, we can go straight to elevated, using this smooth transition lot:


The line now needs to curve northwards, over the railway line. As always, we need to move the catenary so that there are masts adjacent to the elevated rail line on both sides:


We now head west, up the hill, where there is another station to build. This station is on the hillside, so some terrain preparation is required to make the station look nice, namely flattening the station area and smoothing out the slopes appraoching the station, both for the el-rail line and the road serving the station:


We can now demolish all the terrain-smoothing networks and place the station. Since this is a central, and therefore old, industrial area, I've gone for an old-style station. Since this is an industrial area, a car park is not needed - if people are going to drive that far from their homes, they might as well drive all the way to work:


Note that this station is placed on a main road. Railway and metro stations are often placed on or near main roads, for obvious reasons, so keep this in mind when planning your transport networks.
In addition, use your common sense when it comes to building these stations - don't put a station on the side of a cliff, for instance. Be prepared to deviate from your plan in order to fit the line around the landscape it runs through.

We can now extend the line west and out of the city tile:


Before we connect up the other end, however, we're going to observe that there is a gap of about 1.5 miles between the hill station and the sunken station, with no intermediate stations. That's too far apart for a metro line that's just a mile from the CBD. The gap between stations should really be between 1/3 of a mile and 1 mile (33 - 100 tiles) in this part of town.
Placing another station in between the two existing ones is the only real way to get rid of this huge gap, and, in this case, a good site for one is just west of the main motorway, so let's place it:


This is the diagonal version of the station we built on the hill. Using the same style, or similar styles of station on a line and/or within an estate brings a consistent look to your metro line, and so is well worth doing.

Being a diagonal station, constructing the access streets for it is a bit trickier than it is for an orthogonal station, mainly because we can't drag a diagonal street under diagonal elevated rail, at least not without glitching up the textures.
We need a more involved technique. Because we know where we want the station to go, we can demolish it and rebuild the elevated line we took with it:


The street crossing under the elevated line can now be built by placing a medium diagonal street construction piece (the second item in the Diagonal Streets tab ring in the Roads menu) such that it extends under the el-rail line as shown here:


Ideally, we'd like to drag the original streets up to the new street to complete the junction, but the diagonal street piece doesn't work well with junctions, and will usually cause nasty texture glitches. Therefore we have to put our junctions a little bit away from the elevated line. You'll then need to place asphalt SAM starter pieces on both sides of the el-rail line - the override does not carry under the elevated line:


We can now rebuild the station, and add a couple of bus stops:


Now we can connect this new station with the one on the hill. I had to reroute the line slightly to allow it to get down the hill, which required moving some more rail catenary masts:


With that built, there is only one more line to build in this lesson. It's a line that runs from the inner city in the southwest of the city tile, under the motorway and into the industrial estate, eventually meeting up with and following the railway line to the west.

Let's start by building the station on the edge of the inner city. Being an inner city station, it needs to be an underground station, and the station building itself should be a mid-rise building that will fit in with inner-city houses. Here I've gone for the Walford East station, which meets these criteria well.
With regards to amenities, it's the usual bus stop and car park, as with a suburb - except I'm going to make this car park a little bigger as I want to develop a local commerical centre around the station:


Due to the close proximity of this station to the main motorway, we're going to have to keep the metro line underground as it crosses the motorway, placing a transition to elevated on the other side:


The plan then calls for a station immediately after the transition, so let's put that in place, sticking with the same station we used on the other industrial line for consistency:


There's one more station to build - but it's on the top of the hill. This part of the hill is also too steep to run an elevated railway up.
The solution? Use subway. Subway is more slope-tolerant than elevated rail - after all, you can always make your underground station deeper if you need to.

It's easiest to build the hilltop station first, and then route the underground line accordingly, so let's do that:


This station is a little north of its planned location - that's due to the terrain. There's quite a steep slope just south of where this station is.

We now need to take the existing elevated line underground. Here we can use the hill to our advantage by building the transition into it.
We first need to create a cutting into the hill using single road tiles, and then use the Terrain Query tool to find out the height of these road tiles:


(Remember that vertical height on the terrain query is the Y-coordinate.)

We're now going to transition to GLR, using the on-slope transition piece. Elevated rail is 15m above ground level, so to minimise the amount of terrain shifting we're doing, we need to use the Terrain Query tool to find the point along our route that's exactly 15m above the road tiles:


The tile that contains this point is the tile you extend the cutting to (adding a tile or two to allow space for the on-slope piece if necessary). At the end of the cutting, raise the terrain by 15m and place the on-slope piece:


Now run a line of single road tiles along the route of the GLR line to create a cutting, until there's enough vertical clearance for a hillside GLR-subway transition. Then place the transition and connect up:


The transition can now be connected to the hilltop station using subway:


To scenic the faces of the cuttings we just built, let's put in some retaining walls. This is an industrial area, so I've gone for an ugly concrete design that will suit the area well:


Finally, we need to extend this line from the hilltop station to the railway line, and out of the city tile to the west.

It's not uncommon for metro lines to follow railway lines. When they do so, the lines usually run at the same level - so that means using GLR for this section of line and not elevated railway:


Make sure you position the transition so that there's enough room for the underground line to surface smoothly from the hilltop station.

With that done, this lesson is complete.

Our GLR lines, however, are not complete. We can add details to them like signals and fences. We can also blend our tram line in with the main station area, as well as improve the textures on the hillside transitions and the sunken station.

But to do all of this, we've got to learn how to create our own textures, and how to create transparent base textures. So that's what we'll be covering next time.

See you then,
Chris

(Edited on 11/08/2014: Replaced the network-enabled retaining wall with a Ped Mall bridge in response to a reply to this lesson.)

[isii94]

Great update lesson!
I've been following this thread for a while now and I have to say it's been very useful so far

Just a little suggestion: Where the metro crosses the RHW8 underground and changes to elevated rail immediately afterwards, wouldn't it be better to cross the motorway as elevated rail? That would avoid some unnecessary slopes.

Have you actually checked if the sunken station can be used? As far as I know Sims can't transfer between transit enabled lots without having a network tile between them. This might make the station useless.

[yochananmichael]

Another fascinating update. Geez I totally need to fire up SC4 again.

[smileymk]

Hey guys. I appear to have been awarded a second karma point, so a very big thank you is in order for the person responsible. Unfortunately, I can't find out who that person is, but you know who you are, and your kind gesture is very much appreciated. Thank you.

isii94: Thanks for the kind words. I'm pleased that you're finding this MD useful.

Just a little suggestion: Where the metro crosses the RHW8 underground and changes to elevated rail immediately afterwards, wouldn't it be better to cross the motorway as elevated rail? That would avoid some unnecessary slopes.

I wanted to do this initially, but when I attempted to drag the el-rail over the RHW-8, the preview showed 3 RHW-2 routes instead of the brown texture that normally indicates a successful override. Had I completed the drag, the motorway would have reverted to RHW-2 stretches.

Have you actually checked if the sunken station can be used? As far as I know Sims can't transfer between transit enabled lots without having a network tile between them. This might make the station useless.

Initially I thought that it was enough to do what I did in Lesson 21 (add a transit switch to the wall), and there were no 'no road access' zots visible during the creation of that lesson. However, I did some experiments which seemed to confirm what you've said here - an adjacent network tile appears to be necessary.
The difficulty arises in adding this adjacent network in a realistic way. My solution was to add a Ped Mall bridge directly after the station on the north side, like so:


Tests confirmed that Sims can access the station in this situation. Lesson 21 will, of course, be updated to include this bridge immediately after I post this update.

yochananmichael: Yes, you do! And thanks for the kind words, I must be doing something right if you find my updates fascinating.

OK, it's time to start a lesson which I think will attract quite a bit of interest. We're going to be doing some texturing. So, without further ado, let's begin:

Lesson 22 - Textures

In this lesson, we're going to create a new texture from two existing ones, learn how to make transparent base textures, and see how these techniques can be used in our cities.
The techniques we're about to cover are not hard, but will be new to many of you. Take everything in slowly, and be sure to try it for yourself.

Let's start by seeing why we might want to create our own textures. Take a look at our main station's tram platforms:


You can see that there's a step pattern between the tram line and the dark concrete station texture where the tram line goes diagonal. This doesn't look particularly good.
By creating a texture featuring a smooth diagonal transition between the GLR and dark concrete textures, we can replace this step pattern with a beautiful smooth transition which, as you'll see later, will massively improve the look of this station.

We're going to create this texture by bringing the light and dark concrete textures together and combining them together in Paint, before using that image to define a new texture in SC4 Tool.
First, we need to obtain the two existing textures we're going to bring together. To do this, open any lot in Lot Editor, go to the Base Texture tab and click the Add Item button. Then scroll down the list and find the first texture we want:


We'd rather have a white border around our texture than a black one, as the white will make the texture easier to work with later. So before taking a screenshot, let's select another texture like so:


Now hit the Prt Sc (print screen) key on your keyboard, open up Paint, and press CTRL-V to paste the screenshot you just made into Paint.
Then click Select, and carefully drag out a square around the concrete texture to select it. Afterwards, reduce the image to just the concrete texture with the Crop button, circled in red below:


In a separate window of Paint, repeat the process for the second texture:


Although we won't need it until a little later, keep Lot Editor open, because we'll need it before we'll need SC4 Tool, so there's little point to closing it.

Going back to Paint, let's bring the two textures we've got together into one image. We first need to expand one of the images to make room for the second one. This can be achieved by clicking and dragging on the white box at the bottom right of the image:


Once you're over the box, your cursor will change to a double-headed arrow pointing to the top-left and bottom-right.

Now go into the other image, select the second texture, and copy the selection using CTRL-C. Then paste it into the expanded image using CTRL-V. You may need to move the pasted image, as it may be pasted over the first texture - simply drag the second texture immediately after pasting to do this:


Here I've moved the first texture into the middle as well to make it easier to work with. This can be done by selecting and dragging it.

The next step is to cut each texture diagonally in half. First, draw some lines using the Line tool to mark the halfway line diagonally across the textures:


Be careful whilst doing this - your diagonal lines need to be drawn very accurately. By holding the Shift key whilst drawing the lines, you can fix them to run at a 45-degree angle, which will help with accuracy.

OK, now go to the View tab at the top and click the Zoom Out button a couple of times. This will make it a lot easier to do the next bit, which is to erase the marked halves of our textures.
Rather obviously, the Eraser tool is the tool of choice here. This is the tool highlighted below, on the left. In addition, you need to set Colour 2 to white to ensure the eraser leaves a white image behind:


Now, for each texture, you need to erase the area marked by the lines you just made, up to and including these lines, but no further. Having zoomed in, you should be able to easily see the individual pixels of the lines, which will make it easy to erase the relevant areas accurately.
If done correctly, you should end up with this:


Staying zoomed in, the next task is to slide one texture half into the other. This is done using the select and drag method, but we need to make sure that any white areas in our selection don't override the texture we're sliding our selected one into.
To do this, we need to click on the down arrow that appears at the bottom of the Select button and make sure that the Transparent Selection option is ticked, and click on it if it isn't:


This makes the white areas of our selection transparent, so that they don't delete the other texture.

We now simply select one texture and rotate it 180 degrees with the Rotate button, as shown below:


Finally, we can drag our selected texture into the other one. Again, accuracy is key, so don't rush this:


Perfect. Let's move our newly formed image into the top-left corner using select-and-drag:


Make sure to get it right into the corner - there should be no white areas above or to the left of the new texture image.

The image now needs to be cropped so that it consists solely of our new texture, with no white areas. The easiest way to do this is to use the white box at the bottom-right of the image to reduce the size of the image, in a similar manner to how we previously used the box to expand the image:


The final stage in creating the texture image is to resize it to 128 x 128 pixels. This is important, because this is the size that SC4 requires for the zoom 5 rendition of the texture, and the image size we need to import into SC4 Tool.
This is done by pressing the Select button, clearing any existing selections, and then pressing the Resize button circled in red above. In the window that appears, you need to enter the following:


Everything highlighted here is important. We've already discussed the values you enter into the Width and Height boxes. The Maintain aspect ratio box circled in blue must not be ticked, as this option will, when selected, adjust the other dimension in proportion to the one we change, which is not what we want. The reason for choosing the Pixels option circled in green should be obvious.

When done, hit the OK button and your image will grow to the correct size:


Our texture image is now complete, so let's save it. It's good practice to keep all of your texture image files in a dedicated folder that you can easily find. You can see the file path I used underlined in green below, noting that it ends in a folder called Textures.
You need to save the image as either a JPEG, BMP or PNG file - I've gone for JPEG here as it takes up less space. In addition, it's essential to give your image file a proper, descriptive name that describes exactly what the texture is. It will make it much easier to identify and find your image in the future, and will remind you of the texture's purpose:


To change the image type, if you don't know already, simply click the drop-down menu underlined in blue above, and choose the file type you want.

So, our texture image has now been created. It remains only to create a DAT file, readable by the game, that defines a texture using this image.

At this point, however, I should point out something important. Here, we've created a texture by combining two existing ones.
It is, of course, possible to make your own textures from scratch, and the procedure for doing this should now be clear - simply create a 128 x 128 - pixel JPEG image in your preferred software, and then create a DAT defining that texture in-game using the procedure I'm about to outline.
As worthwhile a pursuit as scratch-making textures is however, we'll save it for Project 4 on this MD. Right now, let's get back on topic and create a DAT for the texture image we just made.

Now, as you may have realised from your time on the Lot Editor, every texture in the game has a unique reference number, called an Instance ID, or IID for short. This number is used by the game to identify the texture, and, as you might guess, part of the process of defining a new texture is to allocate an IID for it.
In order to prevent confilcts, we need to make sure that the IID we choose isn't taken already by other textures in our Plugins folder, and we also need to make sure that any textures we download in the future don't have the same IID as our texture.
So before you do anything else, it's a good idea to pop over to the BSC Texture Index and ask for your own IID range. The good people at BSC will then give you a range of IIDs that are exclusively for your use, which will stop other seasoned modders producing textures that conflict with yours, as well as stopping your textures conflicting with any others that might be out there, which is essential if you plan on releasing your textures publically.

Once you've got your IID range, you need to create a text file that tells SC4 Tool what that range is, so that it displays on the texture creation tool which you'll see in a minute.
Go into Notepad and type in the lower and upper limits of your allocated range, separated by a comma, and no spaces. Your completed text file should look similar to this one, but with different IID numbers:


This file then needs to be saved as a text document (TXT file) with the name Range, and needs to be saved under (Drive):\\...\SC4 Tool\System, as you see here:


You now need to choose a specific IID within that range. An IID is a hexadecimal number, consisting of 0x followed by 8 characters, which can be any of the digits 0-9 or any of the letters A-F. For textures, these 8 digits play specific roles in the game, and so your chosen IID needs to obey the following rules:
- It must be within your allocated range (obviously).
- The 5th digit must not be 0, 1, 2 or 3. This is because the digits 0-3 in this position define wealth levels for the texture, which we don't want.
- The 6th and 7th digits must both be 0. The 6th digit is believed to determine whether the texture represents a dilapidated lot or not (1 for yes, 0 for no). The 7th digit's purpose is unknown, but all the textures I've seen have a 0 in this position.
- The 8th digit should also be 0. This final digit determines the zoom level - 0 represents zoom 1, 1 represents zoom 2, and so on. Although our JPEG is for zoom 5, SC4 Tool will do all of the relevant zoom allocations for you.

(Don't worry about what hexadecimal numbers are. We'll go over them in detail in Project 4 - for now, you can think of them as sequences of letters and numbers with the properties outlined above.)

In my case, my allocated range is 0xF8440000 - 0xF847FFFF, and so I've chosen 0xF8444000 as the IID for our new texture. As you may check, this meets all of the criteria outlined above.

Whilst we've still got Lot Editor open, let's open up the base texture list again and check that our chosen IID isn't already taken:


You can see that 0xF8444000 is free - there is a texture with a lower IID (underlined in red), and the next texture has a higher IID than our chosen one (underlined in blue). In fact, my entire IID range is free in my case.

So we can close Lot Editor and proceed with our texture creation. At this point, it's a good idea to make a note of our chosen IID, so that we have a record of it and avoid using it again in the future as a result. A spreadsheet is perfect for this, as it's easy to keep things neat and organised:


With our IID chosen, we can proceed to define the texture. We first need to create a blank DAT that we will fill later. This is most easily done using the Reader.
I know that I've said in the past that anything Reader-related is Project 4 material, but this task, as well as the procedure for obtaining transparent base textures you'll see later, is very simple and should be easy for you guys, so we'll do it now.
Open up the Reader, and you will see a file on the left called blank.dat. Click on it to activate it:


You then need to save it. Go to File > Save As..., and save the file as a DAT file. We've discussed naming conventions for files before, and these apply to texture files as much as they do to everything else, so make sure you use your naming system here. Your file name should explain exactly what the file does. I've also included the IID of the texture here, which will help enormously when working with this texture in the future:


Note that I've put this file into the same folder as the texture image file, which will make it easy to locate. We'll move the DAT to the Plugins folder when it's finished.

We now have a blank DAT file to fill with information about our new texture. Close the Reader, open SC4 Tool, and select the Texture Creator, circled in red below:


The following window will appear - you need to click on the star button circled in red below, and open up the DAT file you just created:


A folder system graphic will appear on the left pane to confirm that you've opened the DAT file. Now click the Add button, which is the picture-like button circled in red below:


A new window will appear, and in it, you need to enter the information that defines the texture in the game:


In the box labelled 'IID', type in your chosen IID for your new texture.
In the list labelled 'Type', you need to select the Standard Texture option circled in dark blue above. ('Standard texture' is SC4 Tool's terminology for a base texture, whilst a 'traffic texture' is an overlay texture.)
You also need to untick the box labelled 'Ignore' at the bottom (circled in green), next to a display of what should be your chosen IID range. You want to be certain that your chosen IID is within your range.

The box labelled 'Disable TGI Checking' can be ticked or unticked - I've left it unticked, as there's no harm in making absolutely sure our TGI references are right, even though we're sure that they are.
I should also point out that the link at the bottom of this window, where it says you can get your own IID range, is out of date and no longer works. The link I provided above to the BSC Texture Index is current and will work, so use that instead.

Once you've entered the required information, click on the Open button circled in light blue above, find your texture JPEG file, and open it:


You can see that the zoom 5 preview of our new texture has appeared. To create the files for the other zoom levels, click the camera button circled in red above.

The previews for the other zoom levels will automatically be created. All you now have to do is press the OK button:


We don't need to worry about the section labelled 'Alpha' - that's only relevant to overlay textures, and we're creating a base texture, so we can leave it blank.
(Specifically, an alpha tells the game which parts of the overlay texture to display and which to leave transparent.)

All that's left is to save the DAT file, close SC4 Tool, and move the DAT file into your Plugins folder.
You've just created your own texture. If you reopen Lot Editor and open the base texture selection list, you should see the new texture appear under the IID you assigned it:


We can then proceed to create lots with this new texture. We need to make some lots containing catenary masts for our tram line. Note in particular that 2 lots are necessary for the orthogonal catenary mast, because there are 2 ways in which we can run an orthogonal route into a diagonal one - vertically and horizontally:






Let's now save those lots and place them in the game:


You can see the difference our new texture has made. It's a massive improvement over what we had before - a highly satisfying reward for a good bit of hard work.

We've completed the first half of the lesson. The second half will cover making transparent base textures by removing existing base textures from the relevant lot in Reader.
You can see why we might want to do this from the picture of the sunken GLR station we built in Lesson 21 featured in the replies section of this update. By creating a transparent base texture for the station and the transitions, we can make the track through these lots look similar to the rural GLR track we use in between stations, which will drastically improve the look of the station.
We can also apply the technique to make GLR signals, as well as fences for both our GLR and regular railway lines.

So let's get to it. The first and most important point to make is that making transparent base textures is the very last thing that you do when working on a lot. Because you can't save a lot in Lot Editor without base textures, you need to essentially have your lot completed before removing any base textures on it. Any changes you make afterwards will result in you having to add a base texture and remove it all over again.

With that in mind, let's get the sunken GLR station looking how we want it. We need to have a GLR overlay texture running through the entire lot, and we also need to use the same base texture on all tiles. It doesn't matter which base texture we use, but using one texture will make the removal process much easier:


OK, so the 'GLR' texture I've used is actually the default Maxis rail texture, but the proper rural GLR texture didn't show up on Lot Editor's overlay texture list. As you'll see later though, this texture lines up perfectly with the rural GLR texture and doesn't look too bad, so I'm happy to stick with it here.

We now need to make a note of the IID of the base texture. If you go to the Base Texture tab of Lot Editor and then hover over one of the tiles on the lot diagram, you will see the base texture IID appear beneath the diagram:


You can also make a note of the overlay texture's IID if you want, using the same method - you can see this in the picture above this one.

All the props, buildings and textures for the lot are complete, so let's close Lot Editor and open the lot in Reader.
To open a lot in Reader, click the Open button at the top left of the window, navigate to your lot file, and click OK. Your lot will then appear as a new button on the left pane under 'Loaded DAT':


You need to click this lot button (circled in red above) to activate the lot file, and then click the button marked 'Fill the list' (circled in blue above) to access the lot properties:


Click on the exemplar file highlighted above to open the lot configuration properties exemplar. Note that this will not always be the first exemplar file on the list, so you'll have to identify it by the second property listed on the right, which should read LotConfigurations.
There are quite a few properties listed here, but the only ones we're interested in are those with a Rep of 13 and a value starting with 0x00000002,... - the first of which is underlined in red above. These properties define the textures to be used on a particular tile.

You can see that there are 10 such properties - 5 for the base textures, 5 for the overlay textures (1 per tile). But it's not immediately obvious which properties cover which textures, so we need to find out by checking each of the 10 properties in turn. To do this, we need to right-click on the property in question and choose Edit property from the menu that appears:


A window will appear showing the 13 numbers that make up the value for the property. We want the bottom number, which should look familiar:


This number is exactly the IID of the base texture we've got on our station lot, and indeed, is the number that specifies the texture to be used in a particular tile. This means that we've found one of the base texture properties we were looking for.
Therefore we can close this window, right-click on the property again, and select Delete property from the menu:


You'll be asked whether you really want to delete the property, and in this case you do, so click Yes to get rid of it.
Doing this removes any reference to a base texture for the relevant tile of the lot, causing the game not to display a base texture for that tile, revealing the plain terrain below. This is exactly what we want to happen.

The remaining 4 properties that refer to the other 4 base textures now need to be identified and deleted in the same way. Be aware that some of the properties starting with 0x00000002 will refer to the GLR overlay textures, and will have a different last number in their Value setting to the IID of your base texture. We want to keep these.
When you've removed all of the base texture properties, your property list should look similar to this:


The last step is to right-click any property and select Reindex Lot Config from the menu that appears:


This re-shuffles and re-numbers all of the properties so that they're in sequence again, ensuring that the lot will continue to work correctly.

You can now save the lot, and you're done.

Now let's take care of the hillside GLR-underground transitions. Again, we need to give the lot a rural GLR-like texture. We can keep the existing base texture, since we're just going to delete it in Reader anyway:


Using the same procedure as that outlined above, it's a simple task to then remove the base texture in Reader. I'll leave it to you as an exercise.
Once our lots have been successfully relieved of their base textures, it's time to load up Mapleford and admire our work. The changes will be put into effect automatically by the game, so you don't have to rebuild anything:


I think you'll agree that that's another huge improvement over what we had before.

Let's carry on and use what we've just learnt to make some more cool stuff. We'll start with a signal lot for our GLR lines.
We'll make this lot by modifying the transit-enabled rail signal we made earlier on in the project to work with GLR:


Of course, we need to modify the transit-enabling for this lot so that it takes el-rail instead of regular rail:




Now remove the base texture using the method described above, save the lot, and place it on your GLR lines:


Signalling GLR lines is similar to signalling regular lines, although the line speed will usually be slower and stations are more frequent, so signals should be a little more frequent as well - about one every 50 tiles (half a mile) should suffice.
As with rail lines, though, the location of the signals are more important than their spread. Make sure that your signals are easily sighted - don't put them at the end of curves or behind structures.

While we're at it, let's remove the dirt texture from our existing railway signal, replacing it with a transparent texture that fits in much better with its surroundings:


Finally, let's add some fences to our railways and GLR lines. We're going to use the mesh fence lot from this set, which is the closest fence style available to my knowledge to that used on UK railways.
Although this lot has a transparent base texture, it only has a straight lot. So we need to create some more lots that will allow us to fence diagonal, fractional-angle and curved networks, as well as fence lots featuring catenary masts to take care of the elevated lines, and they all need transparent base textures for consistency.
The procedure for doing this should be familiar by now. First, we create the lots in Lot Editor:












The plain corner lot is not featured here, because I made it before the lesson for one of my side projects, but it can be made by copying the fence prop, rotating it and moving it to a lot edge that's adjacent to the first fence.

The procedure for removing the base textures from these lots is exactly the same as what we've done so far. After getting rid of them, we can place these lots in the game. Note that for the straight fence lots, the preview arrow points away from the fence:




However, we soon run into trouble, as you can see on the right of the above image. The fences are not slope-tolerant, and so on hills we get the horrendous jagged step-up pattern you see above.
Let's get rid of that right now. We're going to use the Exemplar Editor in SC4 Tool to do this. It's the last option on the SC4 Tool intro menu.
The fence prop we're using is a Maxis prop, used in the default solar power station. It's found in the SimCity_1.dat file, which appears under the directory (Drive):\\...\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe. I'm going to assume you know how to open files in SC4 Tool by now, so locate and open the file.
Then click on the folder named 'Prop' on the left, and scroll down until you find the folder underlined in red below:


Unfortunately, this prop file is quite a long way down the list and is not the easiest thing to find, as the list is not ordered. By going thorough the list slowly, you should be able to spot it.

The property we're looking for is the Orient to Slope property. As you can see, our fence prop doesn't have this property, so we're going to have to copy and paste it in from another prop which does. Fortunately, there is such a prop a few files down the list with the required property (underlined in blue above).
To copy this property, click on it, and then go to the Property button at the top of the window, and click on Copy on the menu that appears:


Then click on any property in our fence prop file, click on the Property button at the top, and then click on Paste on the menu:


You need to make sure that the value of this property is set to Yes. Click on the newly-pasted Orient to Slope property, and a tick box should appear on the right pane. Make sure it is ticked:


That's it. Click Save, close SC4 Tool, and go back into the game. As with the transparent textures, the game will automatically implement the changes we've made:


The Orient to Slope property rotates the prop to match the slope, so the supports for the fence are now perpendicular to the terrain instead of vertical. However, this is only noticeable at close zoom levels, and is more than compensated for by the fact that the fences follow the slope smoothly instead of in a jagged step pattern. The overall look is immeasurably better than what we had before.

Let's get back to placing fences. Normally, as you can see above, the fence should be placed directly adjacent to the railway line.
However, when it comes to embankments, things are different. The fence should be placed at the bottom of the embankment, which means you need to place the lots with the arrow facing towards the tracks in this situation, instead of away from it. This is why we made fence and catenary lots with the mast away from the fence earlier:


We can, and should, also fence our GLR lines. The principles and techinques for doing this are identical to those for railway lines:


And that, as they say, is that for this lesson. Hopefully you've learnt some advanced and powerful techniques in this lesson that will enable you to add an extra level of skill, detail and realism to your work.

We've done a lot of difficult modding work in the past few lessons, so I think it's time to take a break from that and do something simpler and (in my opinion) more fun. The next lesson will see us build the surface roads in the city tile of Mapleford we're working on.

See you then,
Chris

(Edited on 11/08/2014: Remembered to include the Reindex Lot Config step in removing base textures, and removed the second camera button image so that it only appears once.)