The Railway Station is a type of railway building in Fall of the Samurai.
Description[]
Wires and rails bind a country together.
The telegraph and railway are the height of modernity: a journey of days or weeks becomes a matter of moments for a message, or hours for an army. Goods can be swiftly transported to new markets, giving tremendous opportunities for growth.
Even before the Meiji Restoration, the Satsuma domain and the Tokugawa Shogunate considered building railways. When work did start under Meiji orders, it was British engineers who got the rail-building contracts. Given Japan's mountainous landscape, the decision to build a narrow gauge (3 feet 6 inches) railway system was probably a sensible one, as this allows for much tighter curves. Shipments of rails and rolling stock also seem to have been diverted from a line in New Zealand to Japan. Narrow gauge locos are also a good deal smaller than standard gauge ones, and therefore easier to offload from ships and manhandle! Other than the modern "Bullet Trains", today's fearsomely efficiently Japanese railways continue to use this narrower gauge. The telegraph, incidentally, was vital to the safe running of a railway because it could send warnings along the line that a train was coming. Among other dangerous practices, it had been usual to send trains off at the appointed time whether or not the line ahead was clear. All telegraph messages had to be sent in "romaji", a version of Japanese written down using the English alphabet. Morse code already allowed for sending English letters, so there was no need to develop new morse codings specifically for the symbols of written Japanese.
General Information[]
Requires 5000 koku, 7 turns, Telegraph Office, Foreign Affairs technology. Can be upgraded to National Railway Company.
- +460 to wealth generated by trade in this province
- +8 per turn to town growth from trade within this province
- Enables railways
- -1 to happiness from modernisation
Clan Effects
- +2 to modernisation (clan development)
Upgraded from telegraph offices, railway stations greatly increase the wealth and particularly town wealth growth of a province. They also enable the Rail Network, allowing armies and agents alike to travel much farther distances on the campaign map.
Thanks to their high wealth growth per turn, railway stations can provide faster growth than any other second-tier building. Unfortunately they cannot be built early as they are locked behind a mid-game technology. Factions with access to rail networks by the mid-game may consider building railway stations as early as they can, since the impressive wealth growth means that by the late-game these buildings are very profitable. For factions that don't have early access to rails, or those who have urgent research elsewhere, the railway chain of buildings may be better avoided.
Railway stations are considered civil buildings, and therefore benefit from events that reduce their cost or construction times.
Many provinces have telegraph offices, though all such provinces are on the mainland of Honshu. They include (from east to west): Suo, Aki, Bitchu, Harima, Yamashiro, Mino, Etchu, Totomi, Suruga, Echigo, Kozuke, Musashi, Shimotsuke, Fukushima, Miyagi, Iwate, and Aomori.