Rails Across America

Guide

Demo Notes. 2

Overview.. 2

Building Your Network. 2

Steps to Lay Track. 2

Track Construction. 4

Taking the Trains Run on Time. 4

Track Improvements. 4

Track List 5

Track Details. 6

Upgrading Engines. 7

Cities. 8

Traffic Flow.. 8

Access Slots. 9

Finances. 10

Loans. 10

Current Report 11

Annual Report 11

Special 11

Dividends. 11

Bankruptcy. 11

Auctions. 12

Politics. 12

Influence. 13

Actions. 13

Shortlines. 14

National Borders. 15

Land Grants. 15

Winning. 16

Hot Keys. 17

Demo Notes

Thank you for your interest in Rails Across America (or “Rails”). This HTML file is a brief description of how to play the game. Please keep in mind that the demo you are playing was produced before the final release version, and as such will be a little less stable than the final version, and will also not have features that will be present in the final version. Additionally, this demo has some features removed, such as support for more than four players, scenarios, and the ability to play past 1885. We hope that you’ll enjoy this demo, and will consider purchasing the full version when it’s released.

Overview

Rails is a game of prestige, not cash. You want to build up your company’s prestige by accomplishing goals, such as building the first Transcontinental line, the first Gulf to Canada line, dominating a region, building the most track every year, etc. Although cash will certainly help you accomplish these goals, it is only a means to an end.

Rails is a competitive game. While you are trying to build up your network, your opponents will be trying to build up theirs, and there will be conflicts over important cities and routes. In addition to simply building smarter and faster than they do, you can also use Influence to put a crimp in their plans. Influence lets you marshal your various resources (such as newspaper editors, union bosses, and congressional committees) to cause a strike on your opponent’s line, force a financial investigation into their activities, or expose some of their dirty dealings to the public and hurt their prestige.

Finally, Rails is also a high-risk game of investment. If you overextend yourself, and a recession comes on, you could find yourself spiraling down into bankruptcy. But like the real world, bankruptcy isn’t the end of the game, and it’s possible to emerge from bankruptcy and go on to win the game.

Building Your Network

You can only build track from a city that you're already connected to. At the beginning of the game, this means you need to start from your Home city (the one with the waving flag). If you’re having trouble finding your home city, just hit “H” and the map will center on your home city. Click on it to select it.

You’ll notice a “Lay Track” button on the switchboard (the wood panel and controls on the right side of the screen). Push it to start laying track.

Steps to Lay Track

Select the city that you’d like to connect. Press the “Suggest” button to automatically select the most desirable city based upon traffic. Pressing “Suggest” again will cycle through all the good cities and then loop back to the first one. The cities on the map are color coded to indicate their desirability. Selecting a city displays the potential traffic waiting to move between the two cities, and how much revenue you’ll make if you carry it all.

Green - there is traffic waiting that you could move between the cities and generate income. Although you will make some money off of the track, there may not be enough traffic to make the track profitable once you account for the maintenance costs.

Yellow - there is no traffic waiting to move, and you won’t make any money off the track until traffic becomes available.

Purple - you can’t afford the right of way cost needed to purchase the land for the track, and so you can’t build to the city until you have more money.

Red - it’s illegal to build to the city, usually because the city is too far away, or because it doesn’t have any available access slots. Each access slot will accommodate one railroad company, although that company may have multiple tracks to the city. If a city has two access slots, for example, only two railroads may connect to it, although each railroad may have multiple tracks.

Once you’ve selected a city that you want to build to, you can decide the exact path that the track will follow. To force the track to build through a specific area, simply click somewhere on the dotted line track and, while still holding the mouse button down, drag the cursor to the area that you want to build through. This creates a key square, which is an area that the track must build through. You can add multiple key squares to make the track go exactly where you want. You can also use the Cheap, Medium, and Fast buttons to change the track route. Cheap will build the track as cheaply as possible, but it may be longer or have severe gradient changes that will slow down your trains. Fast will build the shortest track with the fewest gradient changes, so that your trains will run as fast as possible. You may not see any differences between Cheap and Fast in flat, open country. The differences are more dramatic when you’re building through mountainous areas. Once you’re done making your changes, hit Purchase.

Once you hit Purchase, you’ll immediately be charged for the Right of Way cost, after which the track will start building. As the track builds, you’ll pay the Construction Cost for the piece of track that you’re working on.

Once you purchase your first piece of track you will be given the opportunity to name your railroad. Based upon your track and region, the game will automatically suggest a name. If you want to use a different name, just type it in and hit Ok.

Immediately upon purchasing the track you’ll be taken to the Track Details screen. This screen lets you assign trains from the Train Pool (the engine cards on the right hand side of the screen on the right) to your track. There are two slots for your track, the Cargo slot and the Passenger slot. To assign an engine type to a slot, you drag an engine card over from the Train Pool to one of the slots. The engine types are color coded:

Green – Good for cargo.

Purple – Good for passengers.

Blue – Good for either.

Yellow – Electric engines. Requires that the track be electrified.

Once you have a locomotive assigned to a slot, you can add more engines by using the up/down arrows on the card.

Once you’ve assigned your engines, you can close the Track Details screen.  The track will be constructed and when it is complete, the trains that you assigned to it will begin to run. Once you've laid track to a city, you'll be able to lay track from that city as well. You can't have more than 5 tracks under construction at any one time.

Track Construction

While your track is under construction, you can double or triple-crew it to increase the speed of construction. Click on the track and then click the up arrow next to the shovels. Each shovel represents a crew, up to a maximum of three. Of course, double-crewing and triple-crewing will cost you quite a bit, so you don’t want to do this unless you’re in a race with someone.

If you run out of money while you’re building a track you’ll get a warning alert and construction on the track will stop. You can see the status of a track under construction by clicking on it and then noting the track status button in the bottom right of the switchboard on the right. If it says Working, then construction is proceeding normally. If it says Stopped, then the workers are halted while the foreman waits to get a check. As soon as you get some cash the work will start again. If you’re low on money, and you have a critical track building along with some less important ones, you may want to halt work on the less important ones to save your cash for the important one. To do this, click on the track status button so that it says Stopped. It will remain stopped until you hit the button again.

Taking the Trains Run on Time

Once your track finishes building, you’ll need to check on it periodically and adjust the number of engines running on it to accommodate any changes in traffic.

Select a track in the map and you'll see the engines you've assigned in the switchboard area on the right. The Utilization lights, the horizontal zig-zag band of lights, help you assign the right number of trains. If you have too few trains, it will be red or yellow on the left. If you have too many, it will be red or yellow on the right. These lights don't work until the track is completely built.

Track Improvements

If adding more trains keeps moving the light to left, your track may be congested. It simply can’t handle all the trains you need to move all the traffic that’s waiting. You need to improve the track or your trains in order to carry more traffic. The controls to improve the track are at the bottom right of the switchboard when you have the track selected. You can:

Double-track, triple-track, or quadruple track – this builds extra parallel tracks which lets you run trains in both directions simultaneously. This is a very expensive option, but it dramatically increases your capacity.

Upgrade your signaling – each upgrade allows you to run your trains closer together and faster, which decreases congestion. Upgrading your signaling is the cheapest way to reduce your congestion.

Upgrade your trains – if more powerful trains are available, upgrading to them will let you pull more carloads with each train, which again reduces congestion. Upgrade your engines by clicking the up arrow on the engine card.

Of course, each of these improvements carry with it an increase in the maintenance cost for this track, so make sure you only buy improvements that you really need. Every time you make an improvement, the cost to implement the improvement and the new maintenance cost are shown.

One quick shortcut for adding/removing trains is to click on the specific Utilization light that you want to run your track at. So if the left-most light on the Utilization light is glowing, and you click on the center green light, enough additional engines will be assigned (and purchased if necessary) to the track to get the Utilization up to that green light. If you have only a tiny amount of traffic, even a single train will be under utilized so that the right red light will be lit up. Adjusting the trains via the Utilization lights always errs on the side of too many trains, so it will always assign a minimum of one train as long as there’s any traffic at all.

Track List

The easiest way to manage all of your tracks’ is to open the Track List screen. To do this, press the All Tracks button in the switchboard. The Track List screen shows you a list of all of your tracks, and lets you add/remove engines directly from this screen. Each track has the following information:

Tack Name – The name of the track.

Congestion – Shows how much congestion you have. Two yellow lights mean you are running close to or at maximum capacity. If there is a red light, trains are being forced to slow down because of the congestion.

 

Utilization – The same lights from the switchboard. You can add/remove engines by clicking on the light that you want to run at.

Cars Carried – Shows how many carloads were carried over the last month. The more the merrier!

Cost Per Car Mile – This shows how much you are paying to move one carload one mile. A good number is usually below a dollar. If you’re paying more than two dollars per car mile, you should consider selling the track because you’re probably not making a profit from it. Of course, you may want to keep it for strategic purposes (maybe it’s a link in the Transcontinental that you’re working on).

Track Improvements – Shows the current improvements for the track. You cannot make changes to your track infrastructure from here.

Track Details button – This is a triangular button all the way on the right that will open the Track Details screen for the track.

You can also sort by any of the track characteristics except for Track Improvements by simply clicking the header that you want to sort by. If you click the header again, it will reverse the sort.

The Track List screen is very effective at managing your tracks because you can see quite a few at one time, and it’s very quick to make a change in one and then go onto another.  However, if you want to see more in depth information about the track you can go into Track Details.

Track Details

This screen shows you in depth information about your track, and lets you assign engines and set your default engines. Track Details has the following items:

Track Improvements area – this is the same as described as above for the switchboard area when your track is selected.

Cost per Car Mile – the same as described for Track List.

Cars Carried – the same as described for Track List.

Miles of Track – shows how long your track is.

Congestion – the same as described for Track List.

Cargo and Passenger Areas – These two areas show information for each kind of traffic. You assign engines to pull cargo, and other engines to pull passengers. Trains are rated for how many carloads they can carry at what speed, and how efficient they are. If a train will pull 5 carloads at 30 mph, and another one will pull 10 carloads at 30 mph, the second train is twice as good at pulling cars. Efficiency is how often the train is running, as opposed to sitting in the shop. If a train is 30% efficient, it spends 70% of the time sitting in a garage being worked on. If one train was 20% efficient, and the other was 40% efficient, the second one would run twice as often. Cargo engines are usually powerful but slower, while passenger engines are weaker but faster. Blue engines are good all around. Yellow engines are electric, and are always excellent, but are very costly to maintain.

 

Default Engines – Under each slot is a button that lets you set the assigned engine to be the default engine for new tracks. If you set an engine to be the default for cargo or passenger, that engine will automatically be assigned to the specified cargo type whenever you build a new track. If you have default engines for both cargo and passenger, then the Track Details screen won’t automatically open after you build a new track. Default engines are indicated by a small golden C or P on the edge of the train card. The same engine can be the default engine for both cargo and passenger traffic.

 

List will take you to the Track List screen.

Apply will immediately put into effect any of the changes that can be undone, such as track improvements.

Upgrading Engines

 

You can upgrade either the engines in a slot on a track, or all the engines of that type in operation. If you want to upgrade just the engines in a specific slot, press the Upgrade button (the arrow pointing up) on the card in that slot. If you want to upgrade all engines of this type, you press the Upgrade button on the card in the Train Pool (the area on the right will all the available engine cards). Either of these buttons pops up the Upgrade box.

The box shows the old engine on the left and the new engine on the right. The two arrows on the new engine let you scroll through all available engines. The best replacement engine is selected by default, although you can specify any engine to upgrade to, even an older, less efficient engine. The light at the bottom of the new engine card will light up to indicate how good of a replacement the new engine is. If it’s green, it’s a good replacement. If it’s not lit, the new engine isn’t significantly better or worse than the old engine. If it’s red, the new engine is worse than the new engine.

Below the engines is a line that changes depending on what you’re upgrading. If you’re only upgrading the engines on a specific slot, then this line will tell you how many engines it’s replacing the old engines with. The numbers will often be different because the new engines are more efficient, and don’t need as many engines to do the job.

If you are upgrading all engines of this class across your network, then this line would offer you three choices instead. They are:

All Engines – Upgrades all engines of this class currently assigned to tracks, regardless of whether they’re assigned to cargo or passenger traffic.

Cargo – Upgrades all engines of this class currently assigned to pull Cargo trains.

Passenger - Upgrades all engines of this class currently assigned to pull Passenger trains.

These options are useful because you may have assigned a general-purpose blue engine to all of your tracks, but then a cargo-specific engine comes along that you’d like to upgrade to. You still don’t want to remove the old engine carrying the passenger traffic, so you would suggest Cargo when you’re upgrading the engine.

On the bottom left of the box are the estimates for how much the upgrade process will cost. Cost is how much *purchasing* the new engines will cost. If there are some of the new engines in the Train Pool, they will be used up before any additional trains are purchased. Scrap Old is a checkbox that allows you to sell the old trains that you’re upgrading from. If you check it, it will show you how much you will make from selling these engines. Unless you have specific plans for the older engines, you should always sell them. Finally, there’s Total, which is a combination of Cost and Scrap Old.

A Set Default button at the bottom of the Upgrade box lets you specify the new engine as the default engine for all new tracks.

 

Cities

Cities generate traffic, and for a railroad, that means cash. Since you can only build to existing cities, they also represent choke points across the map that you can use to make it harder or impossible for a player to build one of the prestigious routes, such as a Transcontinental line.

Traffic Flow

Each city has traffic intended for a specific destination. Once a connection is made between the two cities, the traffic will start flowing between the cities.

Example: Cincinnati has traffic for Augusta, Columbus, Detroit, New Orleans, Louisville, and St. Louis. Connecting it to Charleston will result in a track that doesn’t make you any money (assuming that Charleston doesn’t have any traffic for Cincinnati).

Traffic is automatically routed by the shipper, who tries to find the quickest and most direct route for their shipments. The shipper will route traffic over multiple railroads if necessary, but because there is a switching cost between two different railroads, the shippers try to use as few railroads as possible.

Competing on providing the most effective route is a big part of the game. Here are the various route features that help determine how traffic will flow:

Direct track – The more direct your track, the quicker your trains can get the traffic to its destination. Example: If your competitor has built track between New York, Hartford, and Boston, you might be able to take away the New York-Boston traffic by building a direct line between New York and Boston. Traffic along your route would usually arrive sooner than traffic moving through Hartford.

Engine Quality – The faster your engines, the sooner the traffic reaches its destination. Continuing from the previous example, if you were running American engines (which run at 35 mph) for passenger traffic, and your opponent was running Prairie engines (which run at 45 mph), passenger traffic from New York may still move through Hartford because the faster engines compensate for the indirect track and still get the passengers there quicker. Passenger traffic is especially sensitive to travel time.

Congestion – If you have a heavily trafficked route you may have congestion problems that slow down traffic. Until you fix those problems, you may lose traffic to other routes that don’t have congestion problems. Of course, losing traffic helps alleviate congestion problems, but it’s certainly not the right way to solve the problem!

Switching cost – Traffic that has to be dropped off by one railroad and then picked up by another suffers a delay during the transfer process, since the railroads aren’t very efficient at coordinating their operations. For this reason, a single railroad with a less efficient route may be able to compete with a more efficient route composed of multiple competitors. Because of the switching cost, there’s also a big advantage to being the only railroad at the city picking up the traffic. If there are two railroads in the city that can serve the traffic with equivalent routes, the shipper will tend to split their cargo between the two railroads. If there is only one railroad picking up the cargo, then the switching cost will make it much more likely that it will carry the traffic all the way to its destination without handing it off to a competitor, even if the competitor’s route is more direct.

When one route is better than another, it will get more of the traffic from a city than the inferior route. If one route is twice as good as another route, it will tend to get twice as much cargo as the inferior route.

Access Slots

 

Each city has a limited number of access slots. Each railroad takes up one access slot regardless of how many tracks the railroad builds from the city. A small city may have two access slots, while a large city like Chicago may have four. When all the access slots are taken up then no more railroads will be allowed to connect to the city.

If you want to build to a city that doesn’t have any access slots available, you only have two choices: the first is to buy a shortline if one currently connects to the city, and the second is to use Influence to open up another access slot to the city.

If a shortline is connected to the city, you can simply click on it and then push the Offer button in the switchboard on the right.

If you want to use Influence against the city council to force them to open a new access slot, click on the city itself, and then push the Influence button in the switchboard on the right. Choose the Increase Access action and if you successfully overcome their resistance, a new access slot will be created that you can use. But don’t take too long, because anyone can take advantage of that new access slot after 6 months.

Finances

Press the Financial button in the top of the switchboard to access your financial screens. From here you can get loans, check on your status and your competitors, give dividends to your shareholders, and mange bankruptcy.

Loans

Building tracks is expensive! To help you keep expanding, you’re going to have to take out some loans. On your left is the set of currently available loans. You can choose which loan amount you would like to start with, the interest rate of the loan, and the duration (5, 10 or 15 years). To take out a loan, click on the loan. You’ll be presented with the terms of the loan, which you may either accept or reject. The amount of the loan may be reduced at this point by clicking on the down arrow.

Once you accept a loan, the loan amount is immediately added to your cash and you start making monthly interest payments. The loans are structured so that you pay off the interest of the loan each month, but you leave the principal intact. The entire principal is due at the end of the loan. You can only pay off a loan after you’ve had it for 5 years or once its within a year of coming due. Don’t get too many loans because those interest payments really add up!

Example: You take out a five-year loan in April of 1880 for 2.5 million at 6%. Each month you’ll pay 12,500 in interest. In April of 1884 you’ll be presented with the option of paying off the loan. In April of 1885 you’ll pay back the entire 2.5 million to settle the loan.

The interest rate is determined by the national economy. In addition to determining the range of interest rates which loans are offered at, the national economy will dramatically affect traffic. When the economy goes down, traffic slows, but the Prime Rate goes down as well, giving you access to cheap loans. At the top of the Financial screens you’ll see the current Prime Rate for the country.

The loan amounts that are offered to you are determined in part by your credit rating. This rating is based on your current financial situation and some historical data (such as past bankruptcies). Credit ratings go all the way from AAA (perfect credit) to X (bankruptcy).

You can Refinance loans whenever you have the option of paying them off. When you refinance a loan, you can refinance it for less than the original loan. You immediately pay the difference, and the duration of the new loan is the original loan’s duration plus five years. The interest rate is also a point higher than if you were simply getting a new loan, but it’s easier credit-wise to refinance than it is to get a new loan. Finally, there is a charge of 2% of the new loan balance that you must pay immediately.

At the bottom of the Loans you’ll see the total of your current loans and the interest payments you make each month.

Current Report

This screen shows you key metrics to compare your current position against your competitors. One of the most interesting items to note is the Next loan due in number. If you see that one of your competitors has a loan coming due and doesn’t have the money to pay it off, you may want to use your Influence to cause a Financial Panic, removing his ability to get a loan or refinance, which will hopefully push him into bankruptcy.

Annual Report

This screen shows you all the details about your company in terms of both its finances and its shipping. Use the page controls at the bottom to move through the various screens. You can also use the year control in the top left to move back through the years and see how you were doing at that time.

Special

Dividends

Use this slider to declare dividends. Dividends are based upon revenues, and can be set to 0, 5, 10, and 20% of revenue. At the end of each year dividends are paid out to your stockholders, which translates directly into prestige. Dividends are a great way to turn cash into prestige, but make sure that you can meet your dividends, because investors get cranky and cost you prestige if you don’t pay out the promised dividends. The longer you pay out your dividends, the more prestige you’ll get for your payments.

Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy isn’t the end of the world in high finance. If you have negative cash, you can hit the Enter Bankruptcy button to enter voluntary bankruptcy. When you go into voluntary bankruptcy, your creditors will sell off some of your tracks in order to make back their loans. They will continue selling tracks until they make back their money or until they have sold a maximum of three tracks. All tracks under construction are abandoned as a matter of course, and do not contribute to the three track limit.

If you reach negative one million, you’ll enter involuntary bankruptcy. The difference is that instead of selling off your tracks, you’ll lose prestige commensurate with your debt. So if you go into involuntary bankruptcy with 500 million dollars worth of debt, you’ll lose twice as much prestige than if you went into bankruptcy with 250 million dollars of debt.

The good news is that while you’re in bankruptcy you get a number of government-mandated advantages to help you get back on your feet. Not only are your debts forgiven, but your expenses are significantly lower. However, while you’re in bankruptcy you can’t build new track or buy any shortlines, although you can improve existing tracks. After a minimum of twelve months, you’ll be able to exit bankruptcy from here as well. You’ll also exit bankruptcy automatically after three years of consistent profitability and a positive balance.

Auctions

If you need money, one of the most lucrative ways to raise it is to sell your track. Find a piece of track that isn’t vital to your strategic interests and isn’t making you a lot of money. Click on it and press the Sell button in the switchboard on the right. You’ll get the Sell Track popup which shows you how much the track will be offered for initially. You can specify that in the event no one bids on your track, it will be abandoned. The only reason you would want to abandon a track is if it costs more to maintain it than you make from its traffic.

Once you press Yes you’ll go into an auction. From this screen any player can bid on your track who:

1) Has the minimum bid in cash or credit

2) Isn’t bankrupt

3) Doesn’t have duplicate track connecting the same two cities

The highest bid will win the auction, after which you get the cash that the winner paid, and the winner gets your track with all of its improvements, although you do keep the engines that were assigned to the track (they’re moved into your Train Pool for storage).

In the Auction screen you can make your bid by pressing the Bid button. You’ll see your bid marker go up. The highest logo is the current high bid. Your cash is shown on the left. If you want to get emergency credit you can check the Credit check box that will give you a loan at a very high interest rate. If you don’t purchase the track, the credit line isn’t used.

On the left you can see details of the track that is currently being sold. If you press the tab at the top on the right, you’ll see the mini-map with the track being sold.

Politics

Press the Politics button to get to this screen. From here you can set your stance to Best, Good, Ok, Bad, and War. The better your relation is with another player the less of a penalty you pay for switching traffic between your railroads. When you go to War with another player, you make the penalty of switching traffic so bad that you’ll almost never carry traffic originating on each other’s lines if there are any other railroads that you can switch the traffic to.

You can also see how the stance of other players towards you. As soon as a player changes their stance towards another player the target player will get a message alerting them to the change.

The Influence buttons next to each player let you perform influence attacks against that player.

Politics is undergoing a redesign for the final release.

 

Influence

 

Influence represents how much pull you have with various powerful groups. For example, you may have a congressman, a radio pundit, a labor leader, and several union groups in your camp. If you’re racing for the transcontinental with a competitor, you may find it useful to have your labor leader and union groups call for a general strike against your competitor’s tracks!

Influence is represented by colored cards, which are given to you over the course of the game. Each card has a suit (such as Government or Media) and a point value (0-5). You are given one influence card every quarter just for staying in business. Being the first to connect to a small town will gain you a card, as will building to a major city. In addition, the person who won the most prestige during each year gets an extra card.

You can use these cards to perform an influence action against a competitor, a competitor’s track, a shortline, or a city. To perform an influence action, you click on the object (shortline, track, or city) that you want to influence and then press the Influence button in the switchboard on the right. To perform an action against a competitor, you must first go to the Politics screen and then press the appropriate Influence button there.

Once you’ve pressed the button the Influence screen will open up. This screen shows you the applicable actions on the left of the screen, and the cards currently in your hand on the right.

Actions

If you press an action button, you’ll see a text description at the bottom of the screen that explains the results of a successful use. 

When you press and select an action, its effects are described in the area at the bottom of the screen. Any special rules and risks associated with failure are outlined there. For instance, Sabotage will hold up construction or traffic for N+4 months.

Each action draws from two suits and requires some minimum point value to activate. Just above the card area, “Required”, “Selected” and “Available” tell you whether or not you have enough cards selected to perform the action. To continue the example, Sabotage draws from the Dirty Tricks and Labor suits, and requires 5 points worth of cards to play.

Once you have selected the minimum number of cards by clicking and highlighting them, the “Do It” button becomes enabled – press it to start the attack.

The target will certainly want to defend itself, and will send out whatever cards they have of the appropriate suits for protection. The ensuing battle is presented on the Influence Attack screen.

One by one, your cards are matched up against the defender’s cards. Out of this melee, the lower point-value card is always destroyed, but the higher card may be lost as well. Zero-point cards are the great defenders, they always destroy their attacker and are rarely lost, but they can’t be sent on the offense. If the attacker manages to send in more cards than the defender can muster, the action is successful. The first unopposed attacking card is used up in the process, but usually, any remaining unopposed attackers return to your hand.

Some influence actions have more power depending on how many points got through your opponent’s defense. Action descriptions abbreviate “the number of points that get through the defense” with “N”.  Recall that Sabotage will halt construction for N+4 months.

If you played Sabotage against an opponent and sent in these cards:

2 - 2 - 2 - 3 - 5

and the defender has the following cards:

1 - 1 - 1 - 4

your 5 would get through, and would contribute 5 points to the effect of the action. The sabotage would stop work for N (5) + 4 months, or 9 months in total. If you got through with a 1-point card, it would be 1 + 4 or 5 months.

The major disadvantage of attacking of course is that if you use up your cards attacking, you may not have any left for defense!

One other use of Influence cards is that you can sell them for cash. Each card has a little $ sign on it. Clicking the $ sign will sell the card. You may want to sell cards to get the cash, or you may want to sell them to clear out your hand of cards you’re not planning on using soon so that they’ll get replaced with more appropriate suits. For example, if you have a lot of Government cards, and you really want to perform a sabotage, you should sell your Government cards to make room for Dirty Tricks or Labor cards.

Shortlines

Shortlines are small independent railroad companies that come into existence to serve two cities that the players haven’t connected yet. These companies are identical to player companies in every way, except that they have no global scope, and instead just focus on their one track. Although each one of them is independent of the others, they all collectively use the color white for their tracks. Shortlines compete with the other railroads that carry cargo between the two cities that they service. Players can try to buy a shortline, which, if they decide to sell, can leap-frog the player across the map since the player can now build from the cities that the shortline connects to. For example, if you were building a transcontinental from Chicago to Los Angeles, buying a shortline that connects to Los Angeles would let you start building from Los Angeles to Chicago. Building both ways will cut your time in half.

Shortlines are also useful in getting into a city that has no free access slots. If you buy a shortline that connects to a city, you get its access slot. You cannot buy a shortline that duplicates a track that you own (i.e., connects the same two cities).

You can use Influence to force the shortline into various actions if you can overcome their resistance. You can put the shortline under your control (which makes it more resistant to influence by other players), you can force it into putting itself up for auction, or you can force it to collapse, which will cause it to abandon the track. Putting a shortline under your control that occupies the last access slot into a valuable city can be a good way of protecting that shortline from other players who want to get into the city.

Shortlines crop up throughout the game, especially where there’s a lucrative route that none of the players have built. Shortlines never arise to duplicate a player’s track. The easiest way to find a shortline is to use the Find Shortline button in the top of the switchboard on the right. Pressing it again will find the next shortline, and so on until it comes back to the first shortline again.

When you offer to buy a shortline, you can change the amount of money you’re offering which will directly affect the percentage chance that the shortline will sell. You can also bribe the owners of the shortline directly and, if you’re in the same area that the shortline is in, you can threaten to compete with them directly, which will sometimes frighten them into selling. If they refuse to sell, you can offer to purchase them again, but you will be unable to threaten them again. In addition, you have to make a better offer than you did last time, which means it may be prohibitively expensive to purchase the shortline. It takes three months for the shortline to consider and respond to your offer.

When a player attempts to buy a shortline, the other players may hear about it and put in their own offer. If this happens, the shortline will re-extend the three-month period to give appropriate consideration to both offers. Once the shortline has made its decision, the players will be notified. If the shortline accepts the offer, but the player does not have the bid amount ready, the purchase will be cancelled and the shortline will not accept any further offers from the player.

National Borders

In order to protect domestic competition, foreign railroad companies are not allowed to build from a domestic city to another domestic city, although they can connect from a foreign city to a domestic city. For example, if you were a US railroad company, you could build from Laredo, USA to Monterrey, Mexico, but you couldn’t then build from Monterrey, Mexico to Torreon, Mexico. The only way that you can break into a foreign country is to buy a track that is within the foreign borders. From our previous example, if you bought a shortline from Monterrey to Torreon, you could then build anywhere in Mexico that you wanted.

Land Grants

 

In order to encourage development of under populated areas, city governments will offer bonuses to the first railroad to connect to their cities to help offset the cost of track construction. Cities with these bonuses show a gold $ sign next to them. These bonuses eventually expire, so you have to make sure that you complete your track to the city before the bonus expires. If you hover your mouse over the $ sign you’ll get a tooltip that will tell you how much the bonus is and when it expires.

Winning

Rails is a game of prestige. You earn prestige by completing large projects, such as the Transcontinental, or by running a very prosperous, growing railroad. The following achievements generate prestige:

The Transcontinental routes are distinct from one another in their west coast destinations. One award is given for connecting to Los Angeles, another for San Francisco, and a third, for connecting to either Portland or Seattle. Prestige bonuses are given for completing the first and second Transcontinental route.

1st Transcontinental – The route must extend from St. Louis or east of it to a West Coast port city (not including San Diego). The route can be made up of different railroads. When it is completed, an award for completing it will appear that will show how much prestige each railroad got for its participation.

2nd Transcontinental – The route has the same conditions as the 1st Transcontinental, but it cannot re-use any of the track from the 1st Transcontinental. This isn’t worth as many points as the 1st Transcontinental.

3rd Transcontinental – The same as the 2nd Transcontinental, except that it’s worth even less points.

Gulf to Canada – The route connects any Canadian city with a Gulf port town, such as Tallahassee or New Orleans. The route cannot be shared by multiple railroads.

Trans-Canadian – Connect Vancouver to Quebec or any city east of it. Single RR only.

Mexican Railroad – Connect all Mexican cities. Single RR only.

For all of these large projects, the earlier that they are completed, the more prestige will be earned.

Players can also generate prestige by the following accomplishments:

Building the most track (in miles) in the previous year.

Dominating the traffic in a region – dominating means to capture a sizeable majority of the traffic in a region, such as the Northwest, Southeast, etc.

Give Dividends to stock holders – See the Financial section for more info on this.

 

When the game ends, the player with the most prestige wins.  You can check to see how well you’re doing by going to the Financial screen, or by clicking in the map anywhere besides a city or a track. You'll see an overview of what's going on in the switchboard screen, including prestige totals for everyone in the game. If you’re in the last couple of years of a game, and you’re running in second place, start using Influence against the leader to knock him down a notch or two.

Hot Keys

General

P unpauses you from anywhere.

Map View

Arrow keys

Scrolls the map in the direction that the arrow.

P

Pause/Unpause

H

Selects Headquarters

+/-

Speed up/slow down time

F

Find Shortline/Find Next Shortline

Z/X

Zoom in/Out

./, (period, comma)

Select next owned track/previous owned track

‘/; (apostrophe, semi-colon)

Select next city that you connect to/previous city – Note that this only works if you’ve visited City List at least once. It’s a bug that we just don’t care about.

Enter

Details on selected object

Spacebar

Deselect current object

Ctrl-Enter, Ctrl-N

New Message (only available in multiplayer). When New Message is up, ENTER sends the message.

Ctrl-(1-0)

Takes a snapshot of the map position.

(1-0)

Centers the map on the saved map position (if one was saved previously)

G

Goto location of current ticker event. If there is no location for the current ticker event, nothing happens.

W

Follow the nearest train owned by the player. W again will follow any train when the original target train disappears into a city.

[ / ]

Move down/up through the current ticker items.

Ctrl-]

Move to the most recent message. Ctrl-[ is not implemented.

U

Select the Urgent ticker filter.

N

Select the News ticker filter

B

Select the Global ticker filter

D

Select the Diplomatic agreement ticker filter

 

 

With short line selected

 

O

Make offer to the short line

I

Apply Influence

 

 

With city selected

 

I

Apply Influence

L

Initiates Lay Track

 

 

With other player’s track selected

 

I

Apply Influence

 

 

With your track selected

 

S / Shift-S

Upgrade Signals/ Downgrade Signals

T / Shift-T

Upgrade Track / Downgrade Track

C / Shift-C

Add/remove train to cargo slot. If there is no train currently there, nothing happens.

R / Shift-R

Add/remove train to passenger slot. If there is no train currently there, nothing happens.

 

 

Chat

 

While reading a message – Ctrl-R

Reply to the message

While composing a message – Enter

Send the message

While composing a message - \

Toggle the All/None recipients button.

Screens

F1

 

F2

Politics

F3

Track List

F4

City List

F5

Loans – Financial Screen

F6

Current Report – Financial Screen

F7

Annual Report – Financial Screen

F8

Special – Financial Screen

F9

Controls

Lay Track

Tab

Same as hitting Suggest

Enter

Confirms target city and lays track to it. If no city has been selected, Enter does nothing.

Escape

Exits the Lay Track process

1

Selects Slow

2

Selects Medium

3

Selects Fast

Track List

Up/Down arrows

Scrolls up/down through the list.

City List

Up/Down arrows

Scrolls up/down through the list.

Track Details

Right Arrow/Left Arrow

Next Track/Previous Track

./, (period, comma)

Next Track/Previous Track

S / Ctrl-S

Upgrade/Downgrade Signals

T / Ctrl-T

Upgrade/Downgrade Track

C / Shift-C

Add\remove train to cargo slot. If there is no train currently there, nothing happens.

R / Shift-R

Add\remove train to passenger slot. If there is no train currently there, nothing happens.

Enter

Closes the screen (escape does nothing here)

Financial Screen

Without a loan under consideration

 

Enter

Closes the financial screen

 

 

With Annual reports selected

 

Left/Right Arrow keys

Moves you through the various pages of Annual reports.