I love this old DOS/Windows game, and the brilliant OpenTTD project allows you to install and run the game easily, in any major OS. It bundles with a new open music, graphics data and everything, in order for you to run and play the game.

Couple of tips below.

Train Railroads

Use the stations of length 5 as the bare minimum (10 carriages including the engine). Remember that the best train engine in the game (Lev4 Chimaera Maglev) occupies two carriage slots, leaving only 8 carriages for cargo.

Electrified Rails are only available in the ‘Temperate’ map type, as per List of Train engines. If you are a newbie, just start with the ‘Temperate’ map.

Please find more on the Types of Railway here.

Tip: You can mass-convert to electrified rails easily, by employing Universal Rail Type (below).

It is possible to remove just a part of a station, by using the ‘Removal tool’.

Mass-upgrading

You can mass-upgrade all your trains to a newer train engine easily, via ‘All Trains’ / ‘Manage List’ / ‘Replace Vehicles’.

You can also mass-upgrade wagons! Read below.

Turn Radius

Turn radius: Train Mechanics Try to use the curvature of at least 3. Slowing down longer Maglev from 640 km/h to 264 km/h is a pain to watch :-D Ideally use curvature of 4 or 5 wagons in the curve.

Semaphores

In the old TTD there were only block signals. In the newest OpenTTD they’re gone and completely replaced by path signals - that’s excellent since they’re much better. Read Signals for the tutorial. Only use the path signals in the game, and use them as follows:

1. 1-rail paths and stations: use the ‘Regular’ path signal, facing towards the station/path. See “Basic two-way station” in the Signals tutorial.
2. Two-rail paths: use the “One-way path signal” only. Make sure to add a bit of offset after a crossing, so that trains are not stopped by the signal and blocking a crossing.
3. To see a visualisation how the trains are ‘allocating rails’, I highly recommend to enable the “highlight reserved tracks” or “show reserved tracks” setting, as shown in the Signals tutorial.
4. I never needed the “Pre-signals” and they’re gone from the OpenTTD game anyway.

Passenger+Mail Connection Between Cities

Trans-map magistral sounds lovely but doesn’t make any sense within the rules of OpenTTD:

1. The passengers don’t care - two stations is enough.
2. More than 4 stations (assuming two-rail paths+stations) tends to create a clogging effect: first train takes all the passengers which takes some time. Next train arrives to a nearly-empty station and departs faster, thus catching up to the first train.
3. The best setup is 2-4 stations with two-rail paths, middle stations are RoRo.

Read more on RoRo at Railway Stations.

Original Music

The new open-source music is awesome! However, if you’re a huge fan of the original music, you can listen to it as follows:

1. obtain the GM.CAT file from the DOS version of the game.
2. Copy it to /usr/share/games/openttd/baseset/
3. Run the game. The game should automatically activate the new music via the orig_dos.obm config file. If not, go to ‘Game Options’ and change the ‘Base Music Set’.

Universal Rail Type

Universal Rail Type drastically simplifies rail upgrade to monorail/maglev. You can enable the extension straight from the game: go to NewGRF Settings, Check Online Content, search for “Universal Rail Type”, download it, and move it to the “Active NewGRF Types”.

The conversion tool is able to convert the track to universal, regardless of whether there’s a train on it or not. Also converts depos.

To convert all the rails in the entire map at once to universal:

1. Select the ‘convert to universal’ tool, located in the ‘universal rail’ build railway menu.
2. Zoom out, to see the biggest part of the map.
3. Select the uppermost map rectangle.
4. Press and hold the left mouse-button. Press arrow keys to scroll the map, then move the cursor to the lowermost part of the map, then release the left mouse-button.
5. All rails and depos are now universal.

When the monorail locomotive is out, you can simply ‘mass-upgrade’ all trains to the newer train engine. Once all trains (engines+wagons) are upgraded, you can convert all the rails in the entire map to the monorail rail type, using the ‘convert to monorail’ tool.

After converting to monorail

You can also ‘mass-upgrade’ wagons! This is quite important since monorail wagons have higher capacity. To perform the mass-upgrade, head to ‘All Trains’ / ‘Manage List’ / ‘Replace Vehicles’ as usual. There’s a quite hidden combobox which says “Engines” - switch it to “Cars” and perform the mass-upgrade as usual.

WARNING: The mass-upgrade from rails to monorail will only work for “universal rail type” depos. When the depos are already monorail, the rail wagons will not get upgraded to monorail wagons. To work around this limitation, simply convert monorail back to “universal rail type”, then wait for all trains to get converted, then convert rails back to monorail.

Hotkeys

Learn the Hotkeys, at least:

• F1 for pausing. Gives you time to plan new rails; also F4 map is vital for checking particular industry on a map.
• A for railroad building; Ctrl+Click removes tracks.
• X to turn transparent buildings on or off. Greatly helps when building rails.
• L for landscaping
• 6 for demolish; however R removes selected rail/signal/station and is much more useful.
• S to build a signal, B to build a bridge, 9 to build a railway station.
• Alt+Enter for fullscreen

Better Graphics

The default graphics pixelates heavily when zoomed in. You can try to search for a NewGRF named ‘32bpp’, ‘zbase’ or ‘abase’. However, in OpenTTD 12.2 I can not seem to find the zbase or abase graphics, and I can’t seem to pick a 32bpp one. Experiment.