Rule 6.5.4
Existing rule: A route may include no more stations & red off-board hexes than the number of the train. Intermediate small stations may be skipped, large stations may not (exception 5+5E train).

Variant:
Intermediate small stations may be included in a run & need not count towards a trains' range. However they must only be counted between the large stations used in the run when using this rule. If a run starts &/or ends on a small station, then those stations do count towards a trains' range.

This variant rule stimulates rail building to the small stations which tend to be missed out in the regular game. It also increases potential revenue for the Minor Companies as well as the Publics.

Hi

Recently, we played this game twice as 4 player games and this is the first thing that we agreed on for our next playing(there are others).
Having found your thread after playing our games, I support your idea totally as nobody but nobody scored a minor station during the game (maybe once at the beginning).

With the regular rule, connecting these small stations is irrelevant and not historical.It is not even essential for connexions like in RRT. They could be removed from the mapboard without effect.

But I have only 2 games played and this game is hard to master, so maybe I am wrong. Experts can comment here...

Owll

I prefer the method found in 18AL and several other games - small stations are added to the value of your run, but do not count against the length of your train.

Be careful. Adjusting the trains like that will tend to make the game much richer much faster, resulting in exaggerated balance problems.

I should have said "I prefer games that use this method." I don't personally adjust 1861 in this manner. As clearclaw states, modifying this feature in an existing game can cause play balance issues. It also causes the problem that when you play with other players, you have to adjust what you've learned about the game to the real rules.

1861 in particular was playtested with the free whistlestops rule: it turns the late game into an exercise in driving around the board going to every town in existence and then ending up in Moscow.

The rule-as-written is fairly sensible, actually: train companies didn't really care about small towns under most circumstances, so 'stimulating route building towards small towns' is hardly historical. The converse rule, that one must count towns against your run, as in 1830 or 1825, encourages train companies to actively avoid towns, also ahistorical.

"1861 in particular was playtested with the free whistlestops rule: it turns the late game into an exercise in driving around the board going to every town in existence and then ending up in Moscow."

Devin is quite correct. In fact I remember one particular game, where a famous game-designer bored the rest of us in the endgame, by trying to add yet another dot town to his run (and everyone else's as well, of course). The rule promptly got changed.

Dot towns are far from pointless, however. They serve 3 functions in 1861:
a) They provide a useful back-up if your route isn't quite as long as your train,
b) They can ensure a minor has a route if it's neighbours are unfriendly, and
c) They upgrade in a more useful manner (more prongs & universal junction).

I reconsidered selling this. I thought that the track building and minor merging business was a blast, but there were things that really irked me. I'm thinking about playing this again with some serious tweaks. One, I'm just going to use 1830 rules for the stock and Two whistle stops are optional but count toward train limit if you use them.

That's not a variant, that's the base game rules.

Oh right. I remember now. They were just kind of pointless. Hmmm.