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Springtime in Banff

Spring has arrived in Banff. As the days grow longer and warmer, nature reclaims the forests and mountains, the snow has melted from all but the highest peaks, causing the streams and river throughout the area to swell. The winter tourists have left and the town enters into a period of calm, preparing itself for the influx of summer hikers and campers.

This map is inspired by the region of Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada[goo.gl]. It’s true to many of the features of the area, but is by no means meant to be a truly accurate replica. I’ve made a number of changes for gameplay reasons:

There are two outside road connections. The Trans-Canada Highway runs east-west across the map but is converted to a three lane highway and with all junctions converted to free flowing interchanges to improve in-game traffic flow. The Canadian Pacific rail line also runs east-west across the map and creates two outside rail connections.

There are two outside flight paths but, due to Banff being located in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, there are no outside shipping connections. If you wanted to add cargo and passenger ships you could use More Network Stuff to bring them into Lake Minnewanka* to the north east. For more realism you could use Advanced Vehicle Options and change the ships for smaller cargo ships and river boats.

For best results use Theme Mixer 2 and load the Springtime in Banff Theme Mix. Otherwise, you could load a theme of your choice which uses the oil texture to create a snow effect.

• Unlimited Trees Mod - to maintain a level of realism there’s a lot of trees on this map, so before you start a new game enable Unlimited Trees mod and slide the scale up to 6.
  
  
• Network Extension 2 - rather than require Mass Transit DLC I’ve opted to use some of the national highways from Network Extensions.
  
  
• Catenary Replacer – set the catenary type to ‘None’, this isn’t really required but offers more realism.

• Extra Landscaping Tools – there are a lot of rivers and water spawn point on the map so, to make certain areas buildable, you may have to use the water tools in this mod.
  
  
• 81 Tiles - to make the most of the map you really need to break out of the basic 9 or 25 tiles.

If you start a new game with 81 Tiles mod enabled you will notice all tiles are already unlocked and anything outside the start square will not be rendered properly - e.g roads cannot be zoned, roads/rail may glitch and appear raised etc. - it’s easy to fix, just save the game, exit to desktop and reload the save, everything should be fine from that point on.

Lake Minnewanka, lol.