Railways

[CaptainJack Grauman]

I am currrently at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Plusia/255/118/33 on a railway platform looking at a big railway map. At the bottom of this map are shown 2 railway lines (one blue, one cyan) that seem to be laid on sea. Are they laid on the seabed, or are they ferries? If they are ferries, what sort of ferries are they?

 

[Qie Niangao]

You may be seeing a map showing the routes of two passenger ferries, the first of which links Great Second Life Railroad (GSLR) lines in the Cecropia region on the Heterocera Atoll continent  to the Purple region on the eldest Sansara continent by way of the ANWR strait. The second ("VRC") ferry links the Virtual Railway Consortium headquarters in the Tuliptree region, one terminus of the Second Life Rail Road "SLRR", to the other terminus in Bhaga region, by way of the Hyles InfoHub. These ferries run on constant loops (subject to grid conditions such as rolling restarts that block their paths) so you can just hop on one from any of their stops.

There are other passenger services that intersect with these ferry routes, so the map may be showing those, too.

[CaptainJack Grauman]

I have never seen a train on the Second Life railways. Does a train appear when I pay the train fare? Or what?

 

[Qie Niangao]

Originally, Linden-scripted vehicles ran on the SLRR (or at least on segments of it -- even the Main line had gaps back then), and you can read about how it worked.

Those trains haven't run for a long, long time, and instead some automated, resident-provided rail cars are often running. It's very hard to tell when (and if) they'll arrive, so I scripted some traffic maps that show current locations of rolling stock on the SLRR; they're on Virtual Railway Consortium locations near many major SLRR train stations.

For the most part, though, the SLRR is "bring your own train" which is why VRC offers freebies at many locations to at least get one started riding the rails. Of course, there are also many commercial products of varying sophistication and design.

But the SLRR (the complex rail network on the Heterocera Atoll) is not the only rail in Second Life.  On the Mainland:

• the GSLR on the "color regions" of far north Sansara continent has a continuously running automated passenger car,
• the ONSR in the snow regions has two automated monorails, and
• a Linden / Mole trolley runs on the Route 66 "main drag" of Bay City, and
• through the Nova Albion regions between Luna Oaks and Dore (currently out-of-service), and
• there are also on-demand monorail pods available at stations in the Kama City section of Zindra continent.

And of course there are numerous resident-run trains and monorails on private land, some of which are automated.