Making trains act differently on mod added rails

[FuryoftheStars]

I’m just curious if it’s possible to make mod added rails actually have an affect on the trains passing over them. For example, if I wanted to make a rail that uses iron instead of steel, but trains need to go slower on them/would cause higher friction, would that be possible?

[Pi-C]

I’m just curious if it’s possible to make mod added rails actually have an affect on the trains passing over them. For example, if I wanted to make a rail that uses iron instead of steel, but trains need to go slower on them/would cause higher friction, would that be possible?

As far as I know, there is no way to achieve that. I've been interested in the same thing for Bio Industries with its wooden rails, and it definitely would be useful for a mod like Cargo Ships, which allows you to drive trains on waterways or ships on normal land-based train tracks.

So why don't the devs fix that? Seems like this would put a high UPS tax on train pathfinding: All trains would have to check the whole network not only for the state of rail signals, but also for the rail prototypes along their way. It would also make it easy to mess up your complete network if even a small section of the tracks was replaced with the wrong rail prototype (e.g. replacing regular rails with junk rails would make that section impassable to heavy trains).