Thank you very much for this mod! It es elemental for my island based gameplay.

But since enemies cannot swim (which I like and I don't want swimming mods to be active) the rails on water are a bit cheaty because you can avoid every island with to many enemies by simply building curvy bridges far away from the shoreline.

I would love a mod option that only allows straight bridges and those straight brides also should have a (configurable) maximum bridge length.

This way you are forced to jump from current island to directly neighbored island instead of building curvy networks around islands directly to your final destination.

I copied your mod now. And commented out line -- ptype.collision_mask = { "object-layer" }
in the -- curved-rail section in the file item.lua. The result of this simple change is the copy of your mod which I uploaded here https://mods.factorio.com/mod/beautiful_straight_bridge_railway
I hope that is cool for you. If you add a corresponding option, I will deleted "my" mod again.

I am also interested in having this option.