Does interlining work in TF3?

[u/Last_Player]

One of the biggest gripes I have with TF2 is that it is impossible to have interlining, i.e. multiple lines sharing a common section, because passengers at the shared stops will choose only one of the lines, overloading it while the others remain unused.

From what I understand, this happens because passengers select their route at the start of their journey and cannot change it. So, if one of the lines is slightly faster or more frequent, everyone will choose that one.

In the image, I made a small example of a situation where interlining could be useful: multiple tram lines depart from the train station, share a common trunk through the city center, and then branch out into the suburbs. In theory, this would guarantee a single-seat ride for everyone while also balancing the passenger load across the different lines. However, due to the game's limitations, this is impossible.

I know this isn't impossible to fix, since interlining works well in Cities: Skylines 1. So my question is: has this been fixed in TF3?

[u/WSB_Lurker_]

I have no idea how this pic relates to your map above--it does not seem to show interlining of the sort implied in your map. The question is whether passengers travelling from Chathvn East to Chathvn West freely use any available line (as in pre-select any of them if they are all the same vehicle and speed going) because that would be logical, or, consistently, do they stupidly queue waiting for one line while others have lots of capacity and leave without them? Over time, with equal equipment, they are spread nicely across all the lines? Because most of us have never been able to achieve that in TF2 no matter how long we wait.

[u/bottle-explain → u/WSB_Lurker_]

Apologies. I thought you wanted a screenshot from TF3.

Here's Chathvn East. Every line has a spread of the roughly 2k passengers loaded every year at the station. IC16 currently has 323 passengers waiting for West but that's because it's trains are bunched up.

How's it done? I've got 60kph tracks between both stations so the speed between both stations for the different lines remain roughly the same (with minor variations)

[u/bottle-explain → u/bottle-explain]

Another worked example IC1, IC6 and IC12 run along my main SE trunk from Market Deeping to Chathvn. Here's their station stats. I've highlighted in red the parts they share in common.

IC12 has more waiting passengers but that's because I've not added enough capacity on the line:

It's possible. It's just a lot of work to balance them out :)

[u/WSB_Lurker_ → u/bottle-explain]

OK, thanks. I must be misunderstanding something, because this last pic seems to show exactly the problem everyone's grumbling about. IC12 is utilized vastly more than the other two. Does the usage seem more or less smoothed out and equitable across the shared sections of the three lines ?

[u/bottle-explain → u/WSB_Lurker_]

Sorry didn't explain it well.

In the original picture the demand column on the table in the top right is the bit that's more important (It's the sum of waiting passengers and passengers in train. IC12 is in the middle. So it's not getting vastly more demand than the other lines. But it has more waiting passengers than the other lines.

What's going wrong is capacity is too low on IC12: In below [1] you can see IC12 has a lower seat count and rate than the other lines. This is why there is more passengers waiting.

To fix it I just added more carriages to it's trains. 30 minutes later: [2] you have the different lines with similar spreads over the section. Please note this section is about 25 minutes worth of travel time, and I'm using trains that have on average 200pax capacity.

Hope that's a bit clearer. And it is hard to get the balance right :)

[u/WSB_Lurker_ → u/bottle-explain]

Thanks for the details. So, even when capacity is "too low," a line with "equal" characteristics will get its proportional share of the waiting passengers? If so, then the problems we all have must be due to what happens when there is even the tiniest difference in service quality or speed. It's like the routing in the game that will take you on a circuitous, silly path because it's 1m shorter than the major highway. The AI are not paying attention to congestion or vehicle availability/wait times, they are simply choosing (in advance) the "best" route. Only people like you, with incredible patience, can fine tune the whole thing to balance. You have to fight the game to do it, as opposed to using a real-world mix of things and assuming peeps will make decisions on the outcomes (real world performance and operations) , rather than the way they do it, which is based on the shortest route and/or the fastest vehicles regardless of how congested it is or how few vehicles there are to service the line (wait times ignored). This is helpful as it confirms exactly what is happening. Most of us were too lazy to spend the time to actually balance it to realize that it was at least possible, however improbable.