Aesthetic Rail Network: Bridges of the World, v1

A whole world rail loop, prioritising aesthetics by including many bridge designs, often inspired by bridges in the real world.

My video tour of the megaprint can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWIxem9fMnk

Although I focused on aesthetics here, this megaprint's rail network is deliberately very barebones. I usually create small branch lines when they're needed, so I may create another version of this at some point with more coverage. I also didn't want to assume what sort of length your trains would be, or what side of the tracks you prefer to use. So, I have intentionally removed all of the signals, and have included only a small number of example train station locations.

Some of the real world bridges that were used as inspiration for this rail loop include the:

  • Pingtang Bridge
  • Sydney Harbour Bridge
  • Seri Wawasan Bridge
  • Rialto Bridge
  • Sunniberg Bridge
  • Brooklyn Bridge
  • Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge
  • Yachi Railway Bridge
  • Ouse Valley Viaduct
  • Millau Viaduct
  • Humber Bridge (and the Golden Gate Bridge)
  • etc.

Everything has been painstakingly built using vanilla parts, and vanilla methods. So no mods are needed for this. The vast majority of the loop is also aligned to the world grid, with the exception of any curves, and a couple of locations where a 2m offset or half foundations are sometimes used (such as for the main span of the Seri Wawasan inspired bridge).

I've done my best to avoid interfering with power slugs, artifacts, drop pods, and resource nodes. These bridges were all built in my main save, and then copied across to a clean save so that I could double check them. But if you find any locations where the megaprint is obstructing something, please let me know and I'll see what adjustments I can make. Two instances I'm aware of: the tracks go just either side of a Limestone node in the rocky desert, and just avoid a Caterium node in the dune desert. It's still perfectly possible to put miners on those nodes, but you'll be a bit more restricted with how you build around them.

Small note: your browser might freeze for a second or two when pasting the megaprint into your save on the interactive map (mine certainly does), so just give it a moment to complete :) (this megaprint is pretty huge after all!)

  • Created on 6 февр. 2023 г., 14:07:53