I too like trains. And having train stations, rail yards or even rail equipment (locomotives, train cars, a train in the station etc.) as objectives in a game is not only fun but also quite realistic … rail assets were critical objectives in many WW2 actions.
As were cities and towns and factories and bridges.
But here's where I just don't understand how to game with them. The towns or factories are not game pieces, at least not in my games. They are terrain. It's hard enough to figure out how to play around the ground scale compression issues with houses in a village ("sorry, the hovel across the dirt track is out of range of your SMG squad" ???). Now you want those so randomly out-sized features of the board to be playing pieces? I just don't understand how to play it.
I'm not saying you, or anyone, shouldn't play with armored trains. If you can live with the randomness of it, fine. But I don't understand how.
To wit:
1/72 is 20mm a much more practical scale for trains. You can use HO European trains (slightly under scale at 1/87). Use a reasonable ground scale (1"=50 yards) and do the game at platoon level. A single train car can represent several cars at platoon level so you don't need a ginormous train.
Pardon me while I look into the ground scale suggested here.
1' = 50 yards. OK.
That's a 1/1800 ground scale. That means the train pieces are about 25 times longer than they should be, compared to the range of your guns, as you measure in your game. That might be OK for infantry figures and even vehicles, as they are relatively small, and it is more like you are measuring point-to-point on the gametable. But the train is not a point. It is an area, a line. And the area, the line, of this particular gamepiece is going to be 25 times bigger than the game being played with it.
We accept such bizarre and random variance between our game pieces and our terrain. So the river (terrain) measures 100 yards across, even though its width is about the same as the length of one tank. But now we have a piece of terrain which is actually being used as a game piece.
Do you play your games with 1/32 scale (54mm?) tanks and trucks, and 1/800 scale (2mm) infantry? Don't you think that mixing your scales like that might challenge your game mechanics? How would your games go, if infantry at the front of a truck were out of range of infantry getting out of the back of the truck?
Even if you compress the size of the train by cutting down the number of cars (one model car represents multiple actual cars), and you squeeze the cars a bit (too much, and they're going to look a bit silly … I mean, would you really put a 1/72 tank model on a 3 inch flatcar?), you're still at the equivalent of playing with 54mm vehicles and 6mm figures.
If you condense your count more than that, you're not going to get to play with the different types of cars you want to use. And in fact I expect most of the gamers out there would actually require enough cars to get the variety they want, some artillery cars, some infantry carrier cars, a flak car or two, a flat car or two carrying tanks…
Someone in an early post said:
A little imagination goes a long way. Scenarios do not always have to be about long range combat.
But if you put an armored train on the table, you have MADE the game about long range combat! Because your train is 25 times longer, or if you have "compressed" the train maybe 10 to 12 ties longer, than it should be relative to the ranges you use in your game. So everything is 10 to 25 times farther away than it should be.
Even if the train cars average 5 inches (compressed), and we only have a 6 car train (abstracted at 2 for 1 or more), that is 30 inches long. That's a 600 yard long playing piece in game scale! So your infantry platoon, if they dismount from an armored carrier car right in the center of the train, are still 300+ yards away from any adversary attacking the front or the rear of the train.
I don't know, maybe you can make it work. Seems far to arbitrary for me.
-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)