Are the railroads good investments?

In an interview with the then-current Monopoly champion Jason Dunn:

"A 'railroader,' said Jason, [is] a certain species of player that avoided most residential real estate with its expensive building costs and potential tax and upkeep penalties, and focused instead on seizing all four railroads and imposing crippling $400 fares on everyone who rode. Railroaders, according to Jason, were sink-or-swim types, having won three of the last eight championships, and being the first ones bankrupted in four more."

The advantage of the railroads is that if you can accumulate a majority of them early in the game, they have a high payoff per dollar spent at a critical time of the game - when most other players will be cash-strapped. In addition, the railroads are well distributed over the board, increasing the probability that they will be landed on. But it is a "make or break" strategy - if the dice doesn't fall right before the high-rolling players start building hotels on strong properties, it will be very hard to slow those players down enough to pull out a win.

I think so, because once you have all 4, you get $200 everytime someone lands on any of them.

If you get in quick and happen to land on railroads, Buy Buy Buy.
If its a round or two in...maybe hold out and purchase real properties.

If yo udo take the railroads try for the other utilities and maybe one or two other properties to hope for as stop overs on your way around

If you have all four.

They are not so good.
They are second rate compared to getting a monopoly on the latter 3 sides of the board.
Every time I wound up buying RR's I didn't have enough money to buy the important properties that I wanted later on in the game.
They're great if you have all four but that can be bargained for later on.

i think they are good investements.
if you have all four, they are well placed so that no only can you travel all round the board, and be gaurenteed a possibility of landing on your own space wherever you start, the same applies to opponents, they will always be in reach of landing on one of your stations.

you need to back it up with at least two full sets in opposite sides of the board (ie light blue, and red or green and orange)

in fact with all four stations, the green set, the orange set, and a few loose others (that stop other sets), i would say that's a winning position every time.

Yes, when you get all them the money comes flying in.

i always do pretty well when i can get at least a couple of them. obviously i don't limit myself to only buying the railroads...

They are useful in the beginning to middle of the game as the rents are nice if you have 3 or more, and there are Chance cards which help with that. When the game gets into houses and hotels, they make nice mortgage properties and "safe" landing squares, but are not worth as much.

i like them.. especially if you have all the property's on either side of one..then you have a snake pit and almost total domination! mwahahahaha