Layout question

[maculator]

Would you go for a triangle?
Has it any benefits?
The way I see it is that it would just increase costs and "steal" passengers from the existin two lines.
But I don't really know and I often had that conflict with myself and since this is a perfect example I'll use it for a poll.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840736920

[canophone]

If you operate separate "price per km" lines, it's a good deal. Worked extremely well for me on the EU7 campaign mission map!

[maculator]

A single line wouldn't make any sense, that's for sure. And I'm farily sure the line would be profitable and favorited by the people. But it also would take away customers from the other two lines.

And just to be clear I would build a new connection/extend the existing interesction.

[Saint Landwalker]

In your overall situation, I wouldn't complete that triangle. That's the kind of setup where it's reasonable for passengers to just switch trains, and you don't yet appear to have the enormous piles of money to get a good route between those two "endpoint" cities right now.

[clixor]

City growth does seem to accelerate a lot if you add another connection.

[maculator]

Well the lineusage went up, the train makes profit and it only costed me 1 train and a few meters of track. So it's a win-win-win-situation. And the demand for the yellow line stayed at the level it had before.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840759749
(The track had to be bent like that because of the landscape, so it's the best route I can get without a huge tunnel)

[canophone]

Originally posted by Landwalker04:

In your overall situation, I wouldn't complete that triangle. That's the kind of setup where it's reasonable for passengers to just switch trains, and you don't yet appear to have the enormous piles of money to get a good route between those two "endpoint" cities right now.

Yes I'd add those additional connections as the demand for the line creeps up later -- I do all kinds of things in game: triangles, circles, parallels, redundancy, etc.

Triangle-format: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840761251

Also triangle-format: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840760567

A few triangle-variants (with a few bypasses, mergers, and splitters): http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840762842

[Gregorovitch]

I would not "complete the traingel" as you put it. The reason is that if you didi it would simply steal passengers from your two existing lines.

in my experience is that the longer a line is, in the sense of the more station stops, the more profitable it is provided that the line is reasonably straight and does not "dogleg" between cities. This is beleived to be because there are a number of potential passengerts that care about speed (i.e. overall travel time) and this is slowed if they have to change trains, so many-city lines encourage more passengers.

However if there is a "dogleg" then you lose money 'cos you are only paid for distance travelled as the crow flies.

It is however also important that the more passenger connections a city has the faster it will grow.

For this reason I would extend your existing lines taking the red one to the next city westward as we look at the map and the the yellow one either north or south-south east (after driving the line straight through the lower-right hand town).

However there is a further consideration which is that although passenger services are required to make cities grow, they are not enough on their own - you must also deliver freight.

For this reason in your situation my priority would be to deliver either food or fuel, or even better both, to all three of these cities before I did enything else.

[canophone]

Originally posted by Gregorovitch:

I would not "complete the traingel" as you put it. The reason is that if you didi it would simply steal passengers from your two existing lines.

in my experience is that the longer a line is, in the sense of the more station stops, the more profitable it is provided that the line is reasonably straight and does not "dogleg" between cities. This is beleived to be because there are a number of potential passengerts that care about speed (i.e. overall travel time) and this is slowed if they have to change trains, so many-city lines encourage more passengers.

It's more about frequency of lines and price per km! Both fast and cheap passengers will change lines many times.

However if there is a "dogleg" then you lose money 'cos you are only paid for distance travelled as the crow flies.

It is however also important that the more passenger connections a city has the faster it will grow.

I see these as serving different passengers' needs! The 'fast' passengers will usually prefer the quicker line (regardless of "price per km") while the "cheap" passengers will usually prefer the best route according to "price per km" to reach their destination -- this can include hopping on a higher "price per km" line if there is a lower "price per km" line at the connecting station for transfer.

For this reason I would extend your existing lines taking the red one to the next city westward as we look at the map and the the yellow one either north or south-south east (after driving the line straight through the lower-right hand town).

From my tests, that red line would have potential to serve well above capacity; while the blue line would also serve only additional profit (both lines together produce significant profit). This takes some time for the city to grow, but the red line eventually becomes above capacity, followed by the blue line also above capacity.

However there is a further consideration which is that although passenger services are required to make cities grow, they are not enough on their own - you must also deliver freight.

For this reason in your situation my priority would be to deliver either food or fuel, or even better both, to all three of these cities before I did enything else.

Of course, it's always interesting that cities with little to no freight grow faster than cities with lots of freight, depending on passenger connections!

[maculator]

They both were verry profitable until I changed trains and upgraded stations now I only got 2 trains per line running and I'm waiting for the lines to recover. In the mean time I added a far away city to the network.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=840871944
So the new city can grow it's demand for travel together with the other ones who were "reseted" :/
But it's making good money.
The cities will get goods after the passenger lines span across the map. It's a medium map in 1:2 with 7 cities, 4 of them are allready connected as you see.
It's sad that the profit is calculated for airdistance, I'd love to have some intercity-express trains running.

[genemead]

Depends.
I have 3 cities in a triangle. I've put double-track stations in each town. Each train runs on it's own track, back and forth. A-B, B-C, C-A. (So passengers in one town can go directly to either of the other towns without switching trains.) Of course, busses for coverage are running in each town.

As the number of passengers picked up, I added more cars per train. Then there were so many passengers at each station, I had to put passing sidings on all three lines and have 2 trains per line. Needless to say, each line is doing quite well money wise, and all three towns are growing despite there not having any cargo being delivered to any of the 3 towns.

Another way to do it is have a double tracked line(s), with 2-track stations in each city. One train goes clockwise, another train goes counter-clockwise. Sky Storme in his videos did that with several cities (5-7) making one huge loop. He made money too.

So it depends.
It doesn't cost anything but time, so experiment and see what works best for you.

[Vimpster]

I use a layout very much like you describe in my current game.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=841114262
This is a small 1:2 map on medium difficulty. The town of Filey has a direct link to all towns by rail. So far the other 5 towns have a direct link to 2 or 3 towns and require, at most, one transfer to get to any other town. Only frieght I am doing on the map is construction materials to 3 of the 6 towns.

My view of the benefits of the 3 basic types of train layouts from least beneficial to most beneficial is as such:
A) Single town links to neighbouring towns, requiring transfers to go to further away towns.
B) Multiple stop lines that link towns together including non-neighbouring towns.
C) Single town links to all viable towns, not only neighbouring towns. So no transfers or stop overs needed.

What I consider most beneficial is not about what is most profitable neccesarily, but primarily is about what encourages the fastest growth. Or another way of looking at it is what provides the greatest accessibility to a town. And providing a direct link to every town that is viable trumps any other layout in this regard.

Despite what some choose to believe about passengers having no limits in how far they will go, no matter how long it will take, this simply is not the case. It can easily be demonstrated that people have a range they are willing to go based on how long it will take them to get there, very much like it was in Train Fever but without the hard cap. As such You will find that your sum total of passengers will be higher when you provide an express line direct to a far away town rather than forcing them to do a mid-way transfer, because that express line has opened up viable places to go in that far off town that, when forced through the transfer, was simply not in range of some people.

But although your total number of passengers is higher you may not be making quite as much profit since that higher number of users is being split between more lines.