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To raise pass numbers you need to grow the cities. City growth is very much tied to city demands. You need to be at or above 60%. The only way I know to do that in the early years is to provide the staples. The staples are meat, beverage, wood, corn/wheat and another item near the top of the demands list.
Most cities start with a manufacturing plant for either meat of beverage. I would directly supply the needed raw material the plant requires. At this point you can directly ship manufactured items to the cities that need them or do what I do. Either will provide growth.
If I needed to grow Brownsville I would build a large warehouse attached to Brownsville. I would run tracks to neighboring cities and setup a single train to each. Setup the WH for the staples and feed the WH. I find 3-4 cities per WH works. I have done more but as the cities grow eventually the WH is overloaded. This way Brownsville is growing quickly and the other cities are also growing. In time you will need to add more trains from the WH to each city.
Keep an eye on city "Demand". Keep it above 60%.
As for passenger profit. City size, number of cities, conductor and speed. And a variety of tech upgrades.
I've got a few express rated trains, with conductor and such boosts, but they still don't seem to carry many passegers. I also have less than half the map developed yet and I think another 10 years to reach the $150,000 passenger profit so maybe I should build up a few more cities on the west of the map.
But I just didn't, and still don't, see a huge take up of passengers anywhere. I figure going just A-B everywhere is better than A-B-C-D as that way people at B don't have to wait til the trains gets back from D before they can get to A !! Maybe I just haven't got enough of the cities to a big enough population to warrant much passengers ??
So have several cities with rail tracks and passenger routes delivering to A (they have to be farther from B than A is) with a main track and route to B which then has several tracks and routes delivering (and gathering from) to Cities near B (again these Cities have to be farther from A than B is).
The thing to keep in mind: Passengers will only take trains to Cities that are closer to their desired destination than their current stopping point in the chain of travel. They will also only take train routes that are less than about twice the straight line (as the crow flies) distance between the two Cities (which can be a problem when there are Mountains in the way).
At any point in the chain, if trains take too long to pick them up they will stop waiting for the train and start traveling by other means (water or wagon/carriage/horse travel). There are various techs that increase the time that passengers will wait for a train before they stop waiting for a train going in the right direction.
For 20 year scenarios, express (passengers and mail) will wait 14 days maximum to board a train. Once they board a train, they will stay on it indefinitely and patiently. Because of this, there is some incentive to set a minimum number of cars per train because operating trains costs money. On the other hand, express pays more for a faster trip, so there is incentive to not loiter at a Station. The added pay is small. Making fast round-trips can, additionally, award the formal Express Status (lightning bolt.) That apparently is worth a 10% higher ticket price - again small but not nothing.
As to how many trains "make sense" to run, you will capture all available passengers and mail for the route if you never leave a City without a train loading there for more than 14 days (20 year scenario.) Leaving the City without a loading train for the route means some of the express business will find another way. Running more trains than that - unless they are full - won't help because you are already getting all the available business.
Starting out, trains are not even close to full. If trains are expensive, it may not be worth adding enough to get all the traffic, but since the track already exists, there is an argument that if it is worth having one train on a route, then adding more to capacity will usually make sense.
As a practical matter, growing the Cities by delivering nearby in-demand goods is pretty profitable compared with express early on. The game mechanics don't allow "disconnected" rail network, so you generally have to connect Cities with each other. I typically end up running 1 train set to automatic on a single track early between small Cities to move freight available and then fill up with express to a full train. As demand rises, you can go to double track and two or more trains on the same route. (For far-spaced Cities, you can use sidings instead of full double track to save a little money. This also enforces some spacing of the trains - having one train right behind another can mean the trailing train doesn't carry much.) If demand is high enough, you can start separating trains into exclusively passenger or exclusively mail trains, adding booster cars or personnel for higher profit. Mixed content cars can benefit from personnel, but rarely will benefit from the special cars.
Available passengers and mail from A to B will grow as A and B grow. To get a lot of express available, grow the Cities. Thereis more traffic for closer destinations. Because express will take transfers, there tends to be maximum traffic in the middle of maps. Cities near the map edge will tend to have more outbound (from the City) than in bound (to the City) traffic early on.
The number of passengers per train car changes over the dates of the game.
There is a lot of detail on these mechanics in my guide, but I don't go into a lot of strategy there. Understanding the mechanics reveals the required strategy!
Mm, waiting just 14 days may be key - I'm generally only running one passenger train per line so I'm probably missing a lot of passengers as I think round trips take much longer than 14 days so I'm missing out on potential passengers. Even if I just double up the trains I'm likely to see an increased volume and therefore greater profit. I'd naively failed to consider the passengers wouldn't hang around forever !!
I have previously read your guide. But now I'm more familiar with the game it's probably time to read it again.
Using crude maths the 20% for the passenger car update would have added around $160,000 max (as about half the lines already had the passenger car) so the extra $250,000 has probably come from doubleing up on some of the passenger routes.
It leaves me only $300,000 short and well over 15 years to achieve that !! I really do think I've been missing out on loads of passengers 'timing out' so that's a good lesson learnt.
I'm even just buying every auction site that comes up now as it doesn't make a dent in my money !!
I don't think I've been playing slow by any means. If you look at the Task list I'm way ahead of schedule as indicated by the 15+ years still left before the passenger profit task expires. I don't worry to much about the player rating so I'm not in a mad rush to achieve everything. I'm just happy going at my pace.
Just some thinking aloud now:
I think I will 'abandon' a few cities and look to the undeveloped West side of the map. Mm, maybe I'll just treat that as a separate entity? I think the network has to be connected, but I could have just one passenger link to the West ?!?! Or even just link via the resource sites ??
I do like to grow the cities to the point of opening up the 3rd business. But some industries are not available until another 30 game years or so, so maybe there's some advantage to keeping a few cities with just 2 industries. I can then come back to them in later game. Sounds like a plan !!
You'll find out that building clusters or separate entities is a common technique in RE. Just identify a handful cities that form a natural structure and treat them as one big community. Bring in the raw materials and try to produce every industrial good within the cluster distributing to any other city within the cluster. Depending on how far you want them to grow you need at least three cities to do the job. Four are more common. With five or more you can be sloppy as you'll end up with more industries than necessary.
When ever you want to connect a new city you have to have connected every "own" city to your home town.
I'm curious. How did you do this? I'll give it a run on the 100y free game and see what the numbers are.
Quick answer: Watch the number of passengers waiting in a City after taking many away. The number rose for 14 days and then stopped rising.
I remember doing some other testing with an isolated (near map edge) "deliver x passengers from A to B" goal and tracked the numbers carefully. Everything fit with the following rules:
- The number of weekly passengers generated from A to B matched the claim from the City express detail screen.
- The number of passengers available to load matched that generation rate times the time since the last train on that route left, minus any that had been waiting longer than 14 days. Leaving a Station empty for >= 14 days resulted in a constant number of waiting passengers equal to 2 X weekly generation, +/- 1 for imprecise timing.
- Once passengers were ON a train, they stayed on, even if the train sat at the Station for months waiting to be full.
This testing required watching the goal tally as the passengers were dropped off at B, so it was a much more tedious test than the quick test above, including tracking the cue of trains to verify which was which, but did verify that the quick test was generating the right number.