now when you save your game, it saves two files: RR1.SVE and RR1.MAP.
(The 1 can be 0-5 depending on which slot you save into/if it's an autosave).

Now the obvious guess is that the game saves things like "how much money you have" and "where your trains are" in the .SVE, and the current state of the map in the .MAP file, since the game world dynamically changes over time.

now that's super interesting because PIC files are compressed!

And the game can SAVE them, not just load them! that's unusual for games of this age!

that's why it has to save the whole map when you make a save game: because your map is unique.

(and presumably re-generating it from the seed would take too long on some of the computers this game ran on)

okay so I hacked it to go into an infinite loop after showing the first image of the intro sequence, then wrote a script to copy every image into the first image of the intro, start dosbox-x, then wait a couple seconds then screenshot it. So I now have all the images.

Here's the faces:

man I thought this game just had a bunch of random white-guy (well, redish-guys) portraits that it matched with some names of historical-guys-who-built-railroads.

NOPE! every name is matched to a face.