Rail support

Rail support is a building used to place elevated rails across terrain that would normally block standard rail construction. It acts as the structural anchor for elevated rail segments, allowing rail lines to pass over obstacles instead of routing around them or converting large areas to landfill.

A single rail support can hold up to five straight rail segments in either direction. It can also support two curved rail segments, or one curved segment together with three straight segments. Elevated rails can naturally be placed over most obstacles, including buildings, cliffs, and water, which makes them especially useful for compact rail routing through crowded factory areas or broken terrain. Some structures are still too tall to build over, however; for example, big electric poles prevent elevated rails from being placed above them.

Rail supports can be placed directly on water on Nauvis, on oil oceans on Fulgora, on marshes on Gleba, and on ammoniacal oceans on Aquilo without landfill or foundation. After researching rail support foundations, they can also be placed on Fulgora's deep oil oceans. This makes them a flexible option for extending rail networks across otherwise inaccessible terrain types.

Compared with filling water with landfill, elevated rail infrastructure is much more efficient for crossing gaps. To place five rails over water with elevated rail, only one rail support is needed, for a total raw cost of 66 iron ore and 40 stone, not counting the rail ramp or the rails themselves. By comparison, using landfill for the same span requires 20 landfill, or 1000 stone in raw materials, again not counting the rails. For long crossings, elevated rails are therefore far more resource-efficient than landfill.