City Skylines, Building London - Part 4

South West London 1  - Trains and terrace houses.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, 

A week's worth of building to share in this blog so it comes in two parts! My London is becoming bigger day by day but as it grows it's becoming much harder to manage. Population decline, economic stagnation, and financial issues all raised their ugly head but despite these challenges there's also lots of progress to share.

Pimlico looking fine! Classy Victoria houses build-up towards London's fancy museum district and Hyde Park

As discussed in the previous blog the Victorian housing mod is really working well. It's so satisfying to see Pimlico and Kensington developing nicely. My need to drive the population up meant I found myself increasingly zoning up these areas for residential building and I almost forgot to add in the museums. Most of the museums I have in Cities look quite modern but I found some European mods which give it a bit more of a Knightsbridge kind of feel with famous European museums standing in for the V&A and Natural History Museums. 

Paddington station and the Paddington Basin yet to be flooded

By this point, I'd unlocked proper train stations so I spent a couple of hours working on the Paddingon area. Not putting in train lines until now presented some challenges and in the end, lots of lines had to be put underneath Shepherd's Bush. Not to worry though as with a few clicks and a relatively cheap outlay, Paddington was connected to the outside world. It puts Crossrail to shame! Soon the tourists quite rightly came flooding in. 

A better view of the London Wetlands Centre with many bridges! 

While I'd been wanting to build south of the river for a while it was mainly economic stagnation that drove me south. I found my population wasn't growing very well, it, in fact, started to drop but following along with Doctorbenjy's series meant I knew what was going on: 'Deathwaves'. The first residents of my city were now dying off, the initial boom of those early Chiswick and Shepherd's Bush residents all moving in at once meant a sudden spike in death rates. While this petered out, the stead flow of death was now really slowing down the cities growth. Building up Wandsworth and Barnes was my attempt to keep the growth alive. It was also proved a great opportunity to try another themed mod; British Terraced Housing. It took a while to master these smaller buildings but as much tighter streets took shape it really started to give the different areas of London their own feel. I'm never going to get every area or detail right but it was satisfying to see the contrast. 

An overground train parked at Wandsworth Town station 

The traffic issues alluded to in the previous blog turned out to be much trickier to resolve  than I imagined. Despite completely rebuilding the Chiswick roundabout area and routing a few huge underpasses under the city I was still finding that the M4 as your only real entrance into London via road is a very bad idea. In hindsight placing all my industry right next to it was also a poor idea as lorries, tourists and prospective residents got caught up in massive jams. It's a problem I don't have the skills to resolve and is in large part down to geography; the game won't yet let me unlock more parts of London to build on so I'm stuck with the M4 for now. 

How does real London solve this problem? Trains! Trains and tubes, so for the time being all I can do is try to provide plenty of other ways for my fictional Londoners to get to work. A massive overhaul of the underground network was in order. I built out the District and Piccadilly lines. Due to this scale not being 1:1 ratio, some difficult decisions came into play; what stations work approximate with their real position and with my population needs and layout? The answer led to some slightly wavy lines which are recognisable if not exact. For example, my Piccadilly line looks something like this: 
Covent Garden - Green Park - Hyde Park Corner - South Kensington - Earl's Court - Ravenscourt Park - Chiswick Park - Acton Town - Ealing Broadway - Boston Manor. 

Connecting up the train lines also required some bending of the truth, or bending of the lines as the case may be, so that Paddington looped down into Brentford and then over the river to Putney and Wandsworth Town. The result was successful: 416 residents and 483 tourists traveling via train per week. 1768 residents and 393 tourists on the underground and a further 1,589 residents and 194 tourists using the bus network. 

The District and Piccadilly line extending outwards. In orange our above ground stations all linking up...

With TFL well and truly up and running it was easier to get around London, many hours of work was worthwhile but financially I was paying the price! More on that next time...