Instant Urban Railways?

In my current game, I found something awkward: I have founded a city adjacent to another civ's city. Suddenly, I noticed that both cities were connected by a railway. It's not easy to tell in the map view but it's clear when pressing 'T' for showing the transport network. The strange thing was that I had not discovered Railroad neither did the other civ. In fact, the game was pretty much in its begginings.

I don't remember seeing this before, although I avoid building cities adjacent to other cities, either mine or not. Have anyone experienced this phenomenon of instant urban railways? Just for the record, I play version 474.03.

Yeah if you build two cities it looks like railway, but if city is destroyed the railroad is gone and you always lose speed visit a city regardless if it is railroad or not.
So this is "normal" to me even if yeah it is strange when no one knows about Railroad yet but again you don't gain anything on it.

The game just display the city squares as railroaded, but you don't gain the boost for food/production you get with real railroad. So, it's essentially nothing more than a display glitch, connected to the fact that (in vanilla civ) you cannot railroad a city square [the only regular way how to have a city square with railroad is to railroad the square before founding the city - rather impractical for early expansion ;-)].

For the city square to "look railroaded" if there is a railroad nearby city square, the display algorithm behaves as if the city square is always railroaded. Hopefully I didn't make this too confusing.

Btw, darkpanda made an excellent patch, that makes (real) railroading of a city square possible.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=527655

I have a question from similar rank:
- you discover RailRoad
- you build RailRoad around your time
- when you drive through the given town (that lies on the RailRoad) - you get penalized !
How can I make it, that even the town is on the RailRoad really ?

aneta.vratna said:

How can I make it, that even the town is on the RailRoad really ?

Click to expand...

Build the railroad first, then found the city.

Check out jCivED, Darkpanda has made a patch for the program to let you railroad your city with your settler. It works great.

Edit:
Previously mentioned above.

aneta.vratna said:

I have a question from similar rank:
- you discover RailRoad
- you build RailRoad around your time
- when you drive through the given town (that lies on the RailRoad) - you get penalized !

Click to expand...

That's called a railway station. It's where passengers get on/off.

Yeah, building a railroad first and then founding a city, that is what I do in the modern ages. Sure.
Anyway: your answer confirmed to me, that there really is no better workaround.
Thanx for that confirmation.

Yeah kinda dangerous to go full speed 150mph through a city.