What's your prefered train length?

[maculator]

I played everything from single units up to km long trains and I gotta say at some point it gets silly.
I think anything between 400 and 600m is a good length. Not taking into account if they're reasonably.

[gGeorg]

Passangers : ideal short multi unit, RedArrow, Skunk, ... . freq. up to 30 second >> people loves that. So lenght about 40m.
Cargo : Fast, lightweigt loco load up to "Poor" power rating. e.g. Flying scotsman, A4 Mallard. Yes I know they are ment like passanger express service, but game rules work different.
So lenght about 300m

[CashonWheels]

My games start in the year 2000. For passengers I use multi units mostly. I have the passenger railcars modded so the every seat has a butt for it. IE my acelca has 396 seating, the super russian/ German has 500ish seats. The bi-level bombadier goes from 33 to 128 seats. No need add cars to my trains every few years.
For freight anywhere from 350m to 1200m, with the vast majority from 600 to 800m long. I use heavy cargo so I have 1000m trains weighing 25,000,000 pounds with 5 modern locos cresting hills at 15mph! I love it.

Without no cost its whatever you can afford, until your money starts to multiply.

[genemead]

Some people love watching long trains. To them, that's railroading.
Me, I'd much rather have 2 shorter trains. If nothing else, better fequency... and getting up to speed quicker.

Whatever. It's your game.

[Railsplitter]

I don't pay attention to length in KM. I limit my trains to ten wagons (once they have matured and everything carries 18 units).

[Robbedem]

For passengers I most often use 160 to 240m long trains (shorter in the early years, because of less powerfull locomotives).
For cargo trains I go for 320m when there is enough cargo available (using double loco's if needed).

[canophone]

Originally posted by genemead:

Some people love watching long trains. To them, that's railroading.
Me, I'd much rather have 2 shorter trains. If nothing else, better fequency... and getting up to speed quicker.

Whatever. It's your game.

I did a calculation on a local train with modules... It's a case where you can actually fit more passengers with less modules and more cars coupled together than with the maximum modules and less cars coupled together, in the same length!

[canophone]

For passengers, I prefer frequency (parallel lines only work minimally for passengers to distinguish cheap vs. fast; but fast must be better frequency than the cheap line). For cargo, I prefer a balanced vehicle capacity (you can make enough parallel lines to suit).

[Mr Felidae]

Originally posted by Robbedem:

For passengers I most often use 160 to 240m long trains (shorter in the early years, because of less powerfull locomotives).
For cargo trains I go for 320m when there is enough cargo available (using double loco's if needed).

Same here.

[T3kx]

Originally posted by Mr Felidae:

Originally posted by Robbedem:

For passengers I most often use 160 to 240m long trains (shorter in the early years, because of less powerfull locomotives).
For cargo trains I go for 320m when there is enough cargo available (using double loco's if needed).

Same here.

Same here too

[hamtgerry]

I'm still playing my first game generated map. Made so many mistakes laying out train lines and placing stations that it's super rare for me to be able to run a train more than around 140m long. Exceptions tend to be dedicated resourse-to-manufacturing lines, where trains don't share track with other iines (except at destination stations). With those I occasionally get close to 240m. Hope next map to learn from my mistakes and be able to run longer trains when appropriate. How long? Not sure. It'll again be a quasi early 1930s themed map, powered by steam before super powerful twilight steam era locos are available. That sort of rules out really long trains, imo.

[larry_roberts]

320 the max station length in the vanilla game!.

[clixor]

Originally posted by genemead:

Some people love watching long trains. To them, that's railroading.
Me, I'd much rather have 2 shorter trains. If nothing else, better fequency... and getting up to speed quicker.

Whatever. It's your game.

I also do like long trains, but the way this game works it's just impractical except for if you give it it's own dedicated set of tracks.

[maculator]

Originally posted by clixor:

Originally posted by genemead:

Some people love watching long trains. To them, that's railroading.
Me, I'd much rather have 2 shorter trains. If nothing else, better fequency... and getting up to speed quicker.

Whatever. It's your game.

I also do like long trains, but the way this game works it's just impractical except for if you give it it's own dedicated set of tracks.

Well I usually build my stations for a specific length right from the start. For my current map its 480m for example. And then I just keep all the trains at the same length. So no problems.

[Mr Felidae]

Originally posted by hamtgerry:

I'm still playing my first game generated map. Made so many mistakes laying out train lines and placing stations that it's super rare for me to be able to run a train more than around 140m long. Exceptions tend to be dedicated resourse-to-manufacturing lines, where trains don't share track with other iines (except at destination stations). With those I occasionally get close to 240m. Hope next map to learn from my mistakes and be able to run longer trains when appropriate. How long? Not sure. It'll again be a quasi early 1930s themed map, powered by steam before super powerful twilight steam era locos are available. That sort of rules out really long trains, imo.

I still play on my first free scenario, too, and, like you, also started out with 140m long stations. Then I realised passenger transport picked up quite well and started refurbishing those lines by increasing speed and replacing stations with longer ones. Payed off eventually, but it costed me a lot of money at first.

[SoftwareSimian]

I generally build my passenger stations at 400m and that's usually sufficient. Small branchline stations may get shorter platforms if it's more in character with the volume of traffic expected there.

Being used to North American trains in real life, to me if it's less than 2km long (~100 cars) it's a "short" train. Most trains I see are generally 100-120 cars, sometimes 150+. In-game I don't hesitate to use long trains where applicable (long distance + high volume). It's not practical to have all freight stations that long, but not necessary either. For example in real life the Roberts Bank Superport[en.wikipedia.org] unloads coal trains in a big loop and the locomotives pass the tail of the train on the way out again, yet the unloading building is less than 5 carlengths (picture[images.glaciermedia.ca]), so for bulk commodities I'm perfectly content to load/unload my bulk commodities trains at shorter stations.