Best way to earn money in 1850?

[GardenData61371]

Some say passengers?

[Autocoach]

Others say freight , passengers is a bit easier .

Find an oil well or farm near a town with an oil refinery or food plant quite far away . Connect the well to the refinery and connect the well to the town by trucks and there you go . If you are doing the food one use boxcars only as they will be full both ways .

You will probably quickly need to connect other towns on the above.

[Oakshield]

It also depends at the difficulty you play at and if you're willing to get the achievement for not getting loans.

In easy and medium difficulty, setting up an oil or food train is the best method because those two lines generate a lot of money.
One piece of advice, save the game before building anything, as you have to make sure the whole trip doesn't last longer as 20 minutes. 15-ish minutes would be ideal.
When that train line is set up, set up a truck line to transport the fuel to the industrial zone, or the food to the commercial zone. You can try to plant a truck station in a way that it covers both area's or you can use the bus stop glitch and set up two lines to both area's.

In hard difficulty, starting with trucks to transport oil to a refinery and fuel to a town - always make sure they are at two different sides of your city, so they would run partially empty - or meat to a food plant and food to a town may be a better way.

If you're planning to take loans, ONLY use those to buy trains, trucks, stations etc. DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT!! use loans to pay of your debts. Especially early in the game everything will run empty because it has to create the demand. Once demand is there, products will show up and being transported. Over time you will run with full trains / trucks and money will roll in. Use it to expand and to pay off your loans; if you're short of money, take another loan, but keep in mind you will pay the interest at the 1st day of every year, so no matter what, interest is always wasted money.

Thorin :)

[genemead]

All good advice.
* Passengers usually don't make as much money, but they make money all the way, both ways.
* Cargo makes better money, but you want to keep the running empty to a minimum (the closer the oil wells or farms are to the city the better).
* Trains make more money faster (they're quicker and haul more), but trains and their infrastructure (stations, depots, track, etc.) cost more.
* Trucks (well, carts in 1850) are much cheaper (individually) than trains, but a lot slower and haul a lot less per vehicle. Don't be surprised if it takes 20+ carts to equal what one train will do.


The best advice I can give you is to turn off autosave. As Oakshield said, save before you try something. If it works for you, great. If not, oh well, load your save and try something else.

It all depends on the map. With some, it's best to start with trucks. Others, trains. That's what neat about TPF- there's no single "winning strategy" that always works on every map.

[johndai]

Check this vid as it was very useful for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGF7Rw9x0GU


He shows you how he sails thru the Hard Mode even getting the Penny Pincher medal

[SBGaming]

A Passenger-only game will make you a reliable income, but it won't make a significant profit. It'll be a slow burn type of game. In any game where I start running intercity cargo lines distributing the products of a factory to multiple towns and setup lines that run full in both directions, my bank balance almost invariably shoots up rather significantly.

Cargo by far is the best way to earn money, regardless of difficulty, and going road vehicles will always ensure you never have to take a loan to expand, sit around waiting for money to roll in, and you will make more money than you can possibly spend.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=907739751

Trucks are immediately profitable whereas for trains, you have to be hauling a certain amount of cargo to ensure you're actually making a profit.

The advantages of trucks are that they are cheap to purchase and operate, the infrastructure (road and stations) is cheap to build, and you generally always have roads available that you don't even need to build. Trains have to make significantly more in income because trains often have higher up front costs. When you run trains, you almost can never have enough money. A Billion or two in the bank? Very easy to spend in the late game... just look at Colonel Failure ;) With trucks everything you do to try to spend money will simply make you even more money.

The slow speed and low capacity means you need quantity of vehicles on a line to haul the quantities of cargo that will be showing up. Quantity of vehicles means a really good frequency which does a lot to supercharge cargo. As an example, if you have a rail line that has a single train with 100 units of capacity, versus two trains with 50 units of capacity each, the line with the two trains will do better. Cargo will be more willing to travel because trains show up more frequently. This translates just as well over to road vehicles where having 20+ trucks with 4 units of capacity on a line will be better than a faster train with 80 units of capacity.

Each vehicle type has a purpose though. Trucks for Short to Medium distances, trains for longer distances. If you're going the distance roughly between two towns, you're often better off running trucks.

The only time that trucks aren't a winning strategy is when you're playing on a map with a large quantity of water and bridges would be expensive, which makes ships actually useful for something. Of course, trains aren't very useful on a similar map.

[Fortune Calls]

My surefire starting strategy uses trucks. First you need to identify on the map a farm / food processing, and crude / fuel processing pairs that are reasonable close to each other. Construct two small truck stations at these 4 sites for a total of 8 truck stations. Cargo can jump to a neighbor truck station when two truck stations are next to each other connected by road. Make one truck line between farm and food processing plant. Make one truck line between crude and fuel processing plant. Notice the return path of a truck line is able to ship cargo; shipping cargo using the return path can double the profit margin of a cargo line.

Ideally you would want to supply 4 different neighboring cities of the 4 initial industry sites. A city delivery truck line would start from a truck station, and go into a city to target one bus stop in the yellow industrial zone, and one bus stop in the blue commercial zone.

Make one final truck line between food processing plant and fuel processing plant to exchange food and fuel between them. You might want to construct two additional small truck stations for this line.

Populate each truck line with a good number of trucks so that the number of waiting cargo backlog items are kept low. One very important rule is that any backloged final products such as food or fuel should be given priority. If food cargo and cow cargo are backed up, give additional trucks to carry food first.

If the required road is missing between two points, you do not have to be shy with constructing straight path. The only exception is that it makes sense to go around mountains instead of tunneling straight through. Make short road segments limiting to $50k per segment, since long road segments are much more expensive.

[king terry the terrible]

I'll say passengers can go well, but fright is useful. I guess about fright makes it better by the town growth. But solution in passengers are trains. The trains work very boldly, which brings lots of passengers. Just to be a little extra, add a couple bus lines to the train station, just make little more cash in your pocket.

[woz62]

currently doing it all with trucks (& not all industries) & busses, about $20 mill atm...no trains as yet

[Viss Valdyr]

Originally posted by johndai:

Check this vid as it was very useful for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGF7Rw9x0GU


He shows you how he sails thru the Hard Mode even getting the Penny Pincher medal

You can also cheese it by just starting the game at 1850, repay all your loans and let the game run till 2000 without buying anything...