Redesigning the cargo economy model(s) for RR Tycoon III

Introduction

As far as Railroad Tycoon is concerned, cargo has the following main aspects:

the nature and properties of the various goods
the nature and properties of the businesses producing or processing them

These properties include out-of-the pocket costs, manufacturing processes, commercial prices, associated wagon type, historical periods of availability etc.

Categorizing all goods transportable by rail

As implied elsewhere, the program's internal matrices dictate a maximum number of 52 cargo types, stored in the "Types" subfolder of the "Data" folder in the form of .CTY files containing the necessary information about each one. An attempt to add a 53rd Cargo Type in that subfolder will cause the program to crash immediately upon loading any scenario. So, everything that might be transported by rail (practically any conceivable commodity) has to be squeezed into one of as few as 52 general categories (or cargo "slots", if you prefer).

This has obvious drawbacks, in terms of fine detailing, but also a significant advantage in terms of playability. A more detailed categorization of goods might add undesirable complexity to this 1-man-management game, lead to almost unmanageable micro-management (pun intended) and consume far more time than acceptable for leisure/edutainment purposes.

Of these 52 categories, up to 49 are handled by the programm as conventional freight. 3 of them -by default Passengers, Mail and Troops- are designated as "Express" and handled differently, with specific origins/destinations, not moving around according to price fluctuations.

Mind that these 52 -or rather 49- cargo categories may differ from scenario to scenario, provided that a separate game installation is used for the scenario in question. We can say that proper configuration for every geographical / historical occasion will require a separate setup. With storage costs per Gigabyte continuously dropping, there is no reason to try to squeeze every conceivable railroad from 19th-century Britain to 21st-century China or 20th-century America, into the same installation, which poses unacceptable restrictions.

Is there an advantageous starting point to utilise as a basis for a rational cargo structure?

Few known attempts have been made so far to define a plausible and rational set of these 52 or 49 categories. Basically, the user-enhanced 1.06 version and "Trainmaster" feature fully-deployed cargo sets. "Trainmaster" does contain some creative and useful ideas, that have to -and will- be incorporated in further developments. On the other hand "Trainmaster" suffers from the fatal mistake of unnecessarily renaming stuff -which should have been done exclusively through the RT3.lng language file-, to the extent that keeping its content will require painstaking modifications of cargo-related items. Version 1.06 does employ a paradoxical internal name format (e.g. "~4465Ceramics" instead of plain "Ceramics") for the freight classes that it introduces in addition to the officially available game, probably in order to separate them alphabetically, nevertheless I think that version 1.06 constitutes a better starting point towards an improved cargo structure than "Trainmaster".

The limit of 52 cargo slots dictates a process in 2 stages. First, we would weed out unnecessary breakdowns of largely identical cargo classes to save slots, then we would see how to cover available slots with uncovered or insufficiently categorized stuff.

Item	suggestion by Stoker	Verdict/comment by Sbaros
The following are not arranged absolutely alphabetically, but rather taking into account proposed mergers of items. Approved renamings will take place exclusively through the RT3.lng language file, leaving the codenames used in production chain definitions intact.
~4465Ceramics
~4467Concrete	Rename to Cement
~4469Crystals	Rename to "Sand"	Rename to "Aggregates" and merge
~4513Rock		Rename to "Aggregates" and merge
~4475Dye	Rename to "Hides"
~4476Electronics
~4488Ingots
~4493Machinery
~4494Medicine	Rename to "Consumer Goods"	Disagree in principle. However, the slot can be utilised for more relevant loads specific to a scenario, such as "pipes".
~4505Ore
Alcohol		Might be better renamed to "Beverages" and expanded to include non-alcoholic drinks as well
Aluminum
Ammunition
Automobiles
Bauxite
Cheese	Rename to "Packed Food"	Rename to "Perishable Food"
Chemicals
Clothing	Rename to "Textiles"
Coal
Coffee	Rename to "Exotic Foods"	Rename to Food
Corn		Rename Grain to "Cereals" and merge
Grain
Rice
Cotton		Rename to "Cotton/Wool" and merge
Wool		Rename to "Cotton/Wool" and merge
Diesel	Rename to Fuel	Rejected
Fertilizer
Furniture
Goods
Iron		Rename to Iron Ore
Livestock
Logs
Lumber
Mail
Meat		Rename to “Meat/Fish” in order to make it available from Fishports and process it in the food industry
Milk
Oil
Paper
Passengers
Plastic
Produce
Pulpwood
Rubber
Steel
Sugar
Tires
Toys	Rename to Luxuries
Troops
Uranium
Waste
Weapons
New Cargo
Note: The general "Food" category was deemed too generic in terms of logistical properties. So, a "Perishable Food" subcategory was created to cover items with rapid deterioration rates requiring refrigerated transport, in contrast to long-lasting ones. "Exotic Food" doesn't necessarily need to be differentiated, once it is made available through appropriate seaports.

All in all, we have 5 slots (if we include the unused "New Cargo" entry) made available through merging. To the best utilisation of these, there are probably more than 1 options. Through real-world experience, we have the following suggestions:

Salt is a pretty much unaccounted for commodity, despite the fact that salt sources often feature their own dedicated rail sidings.
The sole "Automobiles: category may be considered inadequate, as heavy road vehicles are addressed to a totally different clientele, while they are not sufficiently covered under the "Machinery" label, both in terms of production and sale centers.
Nuclear waste is accounted for in the "Trainmaster" and it is a popular commodity in the modern railway scene, to be adopted in this project.
Flour sounds like another welcome proposal from "Trainmaster", as it constitutes an important Intermediate product -and cargo- between raw "Cereals" and consumable "Food".
Another major issue is receptacles of all kinds: Being hollow, they will fill many more freight cars than their raw ingredients will. So, they are far from logistically equivalent with other items of the same composition. A carload of tree trunks will produce far more carloads of, say wooden barrels than flooring planks. A beverage industry on the other hand, cannot produce more carloads of stuff than the carloads of receptacles it receives no matter if wooden, metal, glass or plastic. It seems unavoidable to provide a single slot for receptacles, regardless of their constituent materials, to provide all businesses with the containers necessary for shipping their products.

Usines Ferroviaires "Octobre Rouge"

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