Last time we said the idea for this DLC came from your suggestions. Today we want to show you the first system we built from them.
Hey dispatchers,
For years now, a few ideas kept coming back on our suggestion board. Tracks that wear out. Maintenance trains. Buildings to keep it all running. Costs that grow with your network. We read all of it, and it stayed with us. It is a big reason Expect Delays exists, and it is where the first system comes from: infrastructure wear.
Here is how it works, and more importantly, what it does to your railway.
Every track, switch and signal has a condition. When trains run over it, it slowly gets worse. Busy lines wear faster than quiet ones. Fast lines wear faster than slow ones, so a 200 km/h main line needs much more care than a small siding. We also added some variation on top, so things do not all wear at the same speed. One piece of track can still be fine while the one next to it is already tired.
Condition goes through four stages: healthy, degraded, critical, and finally malfunctioned. The key thing is that you always see it coming. Everything gets slower and more annoying long before it actually breaks. We call this "friction before failure". You get a lot of warning, and time to act.
A worn track loses speed. At the start the loss is small, and a slightly worn line is almost as fast as a fresh one. But the lower the condition drops, the faster the speed falls. By the time a track reaches the critical stage, trains really crawl through it.
A quick example. A 200 km/h express line can fall to around 70 km/h when it is in bad shape. An 80 km/h regional line drops to around 40. The train never stops, it just gets slow. And slow trains on a busy corridor mean your timetable starts slipping, one minute at a time.
Switches and signals changed too. They are not instant anymore. Each one now has a small time to operate. A switch needs a moment before it actually throws, and a signal needs a moment before it turns from red to green.
When the element is healthy, this is so short you will barely notice it. As the condition drops, the time grows. A badly worn switch can take up to about 5 seconds to move, and a fully broken one around 15. On a tight junction, those seconds matter. A sequence you had timed perfectly stops lining up, and your trains begin to wait on each other.
This part was important to us, so we want to be clear about it. Wear never blocks a line completely. A worn track is slow, but trains still pass. A broken switch or signal is slow to operate, but it still operates.
We did try the harder version, where an element could fail fully and stop trains from passing at all. On single-track lines that turned into dead ends very quickly. A train could end up stuck with no way forward and no way back, and the whole map would lock up. That is not the kind of difficulty we want from this DLC. So wear and malfunctions always cost you speed and time, but they never trap your trains. There is always a way to keep things moving while you sort the problem out.
*[Screenshot: a single line with a slow train still passing a worn-out element]*
Press M and the entire network shows its condition at once. Green is healthy, and the colour shifts as things get worse. This is the view you will plan around. Find the corridor sliding toward red and deal with it before it becomes a real problem in the middle of rush hour.
In the end you decide how hard this is. The degradation speed setting runs from off all the way up to fast. Keep it low for a calm game, or turn it up if you want wear to be a constant part of your routing. And since everything degrades slowly and in plain sight, a malfunction is something you let happen, not something the game drops on you out of nowhere. Look after your railway and it mostly stays out of your way.
So that is the foundation. The railway wears down over time, it always warns you first, and even at its worst it never traps your trains. Which leaves the obvious question: when something does go wrong, how do you fix it?
That is the next train we want to show you. It is yellow, you drive it yourself, and a lot of you have been asking for it for years. More on that soon.
Until then, keep an eye on that overlay.
The Rail Route team