Annie S Transport is set in the Toyland Scenario, which it is generally assumed was designed by someone on an acid trip. It's actually rather difficult to play this scenario for a variety of reasons -- the main one being that you can't look at the screen for too long without developing the mother of all headaches, or losing all sense of perspective. The next major problem is the vehicles themselves. The locomotives, for example, are all slow and have very little horsepower, which makes long distance haulage a problem -- especially as many of the cargoes are "perishable"; that is, the money paid for transporting them drops severely, the longer you take. The fastest locomotive with rail is the 90mph, 2000hp -- compare this to the 100mph, 3500hp in the Arctic Climate, or the 165mph in the Temperate Climate!!
Fizzy Drinks Lorry
The industries in the Toyland Climate are Sweet Factories, which accept candyfloss, sugar and toffee, and put out sweets which towns accept, and need to grow; Fizzy Drinks Factories, which accept cola and bubbles, and put out fizzy drinks, which larger towns accept and Toy Factories, which accept batteries and plastic and put out toys, which are accepted by Toy Shops. Transporting toys is one of the most profitable cargoes.
One of the more sensible looking aeroplanes!!! This is the Toyland version of Concorde.
Fairypool Airport -- situated by Fairypool Plastic Fountain, that brown bubbly thing -- was a bit of a problem!!! The plastic fountain was ridiculously over productive, and I couldn't shift the stuff fast enough, due to a lack of Toy Factories in the vicinity!! I had a 'concorde' and a larger plane shipping it one Toy Factory, and a long, long plastics train shipping it to Lumpyworth Toy Factory, yet I still had over 100,000 litres there. When monorail came along, I added that too, and managed to get it down to an average of about 80,000, but it was still coming!! Notice the well cheesy smilies on the landing pads.
The Monorail from Fairypool Airport to Lumpyworth, on the return
journey.
Monorail was a godsend in this scenario. I had massively long runs to make, as I'd randomly generated the scenario, and it was horrendous!! Luckily Monorail was over twice as fast as the fastest locomotive, so I could move the perishables without too much loss, thank goodness! In future, I think I'll run the multi-headed trains option in the patch for the Toyland Climate!
In this game, I was battling bankruptcy for years. My breakthrough came with this sweet factory, and an overproducing sugar mine a short distance away. I finally got my first train that made about £10,000 a run, which meant I could finish paying off my loan, whilst still being able to afford to replace old vehicles and build new routes. Due to the amount of raw goods I was depositing, though, I then had to have a massive sweet train to take them all back to the town! *g*
The amount of money I had in 2005! By comparison, the Sp@mbusters Transport game had £27,000,000 at the same point in time...