One of the place names I pulled from "The Meaning of Liff" for use in Simcity 4 was Tolstachaolais. I didn't have any recollection of where the real life place with that name is though (it was shown on a map in the book). I took the time to I check it online yesterday I found that the name is split into two parts. It's actually Tolsta Chaolais. Regardless of how it's written, I have used the name several times in Simcity 4 and once in Simcity (2013).
Now the actual place has an interesting claim to fame. If I read it correctly, it was the prinicipal shooting location for a rather successful children's TV show, "Katie Morag". Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry about the place; Tolsta Chaolais - Wikipedia
Now, I may have posted about the Simcity (2013) city of Tolstachaolais in either this blog or on my previous blog. Or I may have just posted screenshots taken of it without naming the city. That particular city was constructed while I was in a rather silly phase of game play. Basically I had reached the point where building logically designed cities no longer held my interest. Tolstachaolais was at the acme of my bridge building mania....
Since I can no longer get the game to run on my iMac, I have no idea as to what its population is. But one thing for sure, I hold it dearly in my heart for some of the oddball things I spotted in it. First off, here we have an airship flying through a bridge....
And buildings with bridge supports driven into them....
In Simcity (2013), all buildings should have some kind of connection to a street, road, or avenue. The operative words being "should have"....
I did have a video showing cars driving into the underground parking garage entrance of the building in the centre of this screenshot. Cars appeared out of thin air in front of the little black strip of asphalt in the bottom right corner of the building and then disappeared into it.
This next Tolstachaolais can be found in my "dq3" / Dragon's Quest 3 region. It's a small village with a population of a mere 29 sims. I think that would be lower than the real life Tolsta Chaolais.
For some odd reason, the two businesses in the town are used car dealerships....
The road leading out of the area might be a bit dangerous to drive on after a heavy snowfall.
I suppose these peculiarities pale in comparison to the other city's oddities.
Moving along, this Tolstachaolais is a mighty metropolis in comparison to its dq3 cousin. Note that there is place named "Great Tosson" in this region, too. I'm thinking of posting about that place name later on.
I found two versions of this Tolstachaolais on my hard drive. They're in two versions of a region which I had labelled "Hitotsu-zutsu" or "One at a Time". That name reflects on how I had built the region; I terraformed a village, town, or city and built it up a bit before proceeding to the next one.
I'm not sure why but this earlier version of the town actually has a larger population than its later version. Looking at it, I was a bit surprised to find the town has a hospital. Usually for these small towns I only have medical clinics.
Here's a shot of a train heading out of town. This little industrial area seems to have two fire stations, one freight station, and no passenger rail station.
So I didn't opt to use one of those PEG "push the garbage into the abyss at the edge of the world" garbage chutes in this town. Instead we have a waste to energy plant.
This is the main part of the town. There is an elementary school just below the bottom edge of this screen shot. But there's no high school. Yet, the population seems to be in the middle income bracket judging from the style of housing.
I then got carried away with zoning for agricultural use. Thus the population didn't grow but there's a heck of lot more farms now. In fact, for some unknown reason the population shrank a bit.
This farm seems to be into raising horses also. That's a nice touch.
Anyways, that ends my look at places I named Tolstachaolais...err Tolsta Chaolais,
