Britain

Campaign Details

**Britain** is one of the twelve original scenarios that came with the game Railroad Tycoon II. It is a real world map based on the UK, which Ireland was part in back in the 19th century and until 1921.

## Strategy

### Starting out

In the Britain map, there are several decent starting places where the player can start from, and can become successful. First, it's important to look around the map. You do start with more money than usual if you take a full investment, and it is possible to connect three cities without taking any bonds. In England, the best places to start are usually:

* London to Slough to Oxford
	+ If Slough has grain, wool or cattle, and London a bakery and Meat Packing Plant, then this is an excellent start, as you can immediately begin hauling these cargo.
	+ London is massive, so you can start with one passenger train from London to Slough, and one for London to Oxford. During the first few years, you can micromanage each load, until your company is well set up.
	+ This route is profitable, and next steps would either be one of the steel mills at Birmingham or Sheffield. There are Iron and Coal mines near Manchester and Stoke, and this should be an easy supply chain to create.
	+ Birmingham is usually fairly large, and express passenger services can be run from London. This route should be very profitable. Remember to keep the track as straight as possible.
* Liverpool to Manchester to Birmingham via Stoke.
	+ The Advantage of this start is that immediately there is a chance of a full iron/coal to steel to goods supply chain available, because Birmingham usually has a steel mill. These three cities are quite large and there should be a wealth of supply of passengers.
	+ It's hard to say what to do next, but the North-South corridor of Leeds to Oxford and eventually London is usually a good choice, as there is a variety of industry and plenty of towns to sell finished products to.
* Oxford to Sheffield
	+ Due to a large fund at the start, the north-south corridor of Oxford to Sheffield and eventually Leeds is a lucrative route. You should hit all of the towns in between for now, and run three or four trains in between for passengers.
	+ Eventually, expanding south to London, and West to Liverpool would the next goals, and you can begin to run long-distance services between them, making as much as $250K per passenger car.

### Next steps

It is important to remember that Britain allows for unconnected track building, so you build separate networks and routes as you wish. To win the game however, you'll need personal net worth, which means that as soon as you are making a heap of profit, raise your dividend up for your company and buy up the stock necessary. If you are playing with computers, then make sure that you monitor their buying of stocks, and while it is important to take risks in the market, a share price drop can be extremely hurtful if you are overextending.

The AI is normally pretty bad at picking a good location to start, and usually are prone to picking the following routes:

* Cardiff and Rhonda
* Edinburgh and Glasgow
* Dublin and Dundalk
* Brighton and Portsmouth
* Plymouth and Exeter

If you leave London open, they will usually go for it though, and this can be dangerous, so lay a small station within the city limits by itself so you secure the location away from the AI. George Hudson almost always starts a company, and he is expansive if not watched. Clement Atlee is not likely to always start a company, and he doesn't expand quickly at all, often sticking to a 4 or 5 station network, no matter how much money he has.

### Victory

Once you get going, this scenario is easy, just keep raising the dividend as you keep going, and you should have $40 million in no time, let alone 30 years.

## Trivia

* As with many Railroad Tycoon II scenarios, by 1870 (game start date), in reality railways were already widespread in Britain since the early 1830's, but the game map is empty at the start.
* Some locations have been slightly moved to help balance the game, including Slough, Gloucester, Birmingham, Preston and Southampton
* If you are playing with *The Second Century* installed, then you can connect Ireland and UK with spanning bridges, which was impossible in the original game.
* France appears in the bottom right corner of the map, but is out of bounds for players, with very few industries ever appearing there.