When to use 2 stations per city? And point to point?

[TheGreenFellow]

I've gone through the main campaign, Britain is the first scenario I'm playing.

I've gone this far through the game only using 1 station per city and double-track networking. On top of that, the idea of needing more than 1 station for a city is 'new' to my experience with railroad tycoon games (except in rare circumstances related to limited space, I guess).

Something I've noticed is, as games in Railway Empire progress, I very quickly get to station 'platform' track utilization numbers of 190-200%+, even when using the largest stations with switches and routes distributed evenly.

I've checked the 'Workload trains' indicator, almost all trains stay consistently 'red' for the most part (which is what we want), so it's not a case of overloading my network with too many trains (if anything, I still don't use enough, I almost always have passengers, mail, and cargo piling up).

I've noticed discussion that indicates the 'normal meta' is to build 2 large stations per city.

So here's what I want to know:

- How do you know when to make that step? Is it the utilization number, or something else?

- Is it better to direct cargo to a warehouse delivery early on?

- What layouts do you go with - just treat it as a 8-track station, or 4 x 2 x 4, or some kind of complex loop thing...?

And for the 'point to point' crowd of experts:

- Even with adding stations + warehouses, how do you manage 'point to point' routing with so many trains necessary to meet demand? Is the trouble I'm experiencing just a quirk of the earlier-era trains being so slow? (Images/video explanations would be most helpful.)

[Thineboot]

With only the Campaign you came with your thoughts, unlike many other "new" Emperors, pretty far :)

1 or 2 Large Stations, just treat them as one Big Station with 8 tracks split in half, so no crisscrossing. That's a game limitation which can be circumvent by adding connected Warehouses for freight - if necessary.

In most cases you'll connect cities of different basic industries - Cider and Ham in your case. That will use up 4 (3-5) of the 8 tracks. Again, most likely the inner 4 tracks. The outer 4, less direct connections, bring in all goods, that are not exchanged directly between cities. In case you haven't noticed, I'm one of those 'point to point'... well, let's say I know my stuff.

But those "Big Stations" are just the end. Start with a single Small Station and only expand them when necessary - they cost money and playing wide is more effective than playing tall.

When is it necessary? When Utilization starts going three digits. It may not be that obvious since trains go in and out more or less smoothly but the less smoothly part starts growing north of 100%. It's not a fixed number but when your Express trains - those with the lightning bolt - start dwindling you're definitely running too much trains on various platforms.

Playing the Engineer provides you with free maintenance expansions. Especially when playing with that character use double Small Stations instead of a [Medium] Station, it's another 20 K you can invest in expansion. Yes, loading time matters but unless you're running into the three digits it's not that important - and if you expand and split connections at that point loading time will shrink eventually, too.

Loops are for Sandbox, when you wanna build something nice looking. They don't solve puzzles but hamper your efforts in scenarios and free games.

The nice side effect of point-to-point is, that you can set it up and forget about it in most cases. If proper executed these connections run smoothly throughout the whole game. Obviously you have to pay attention during the early game but once you've added enough trains to those connections - in Cider and Ham it's still most of the time 4 but England has a denser city grid, there are some connections that are better served with only 3 - you'll revisit them not before you'll have to provide higher tier goods.

So avoid 200%, act before... at least that's what my experience tells me.

As for video explanations, head over to YT and check out Adekyn. You'll find a video explanation for nearly everything.

[chaney]

As Cities grow, they demand / can accept more and more Express and ordinary goods. That gets the player profits. Grown enough, they allow a factory to be added, further enhancing capacity of the Cities and player's company to grow. Thus, City growth is generally desired and a great method to improve your company.

2 Large Stations is the ultimate build because it provides the maximum Platform capacity. The timing is key because opportunity cost is high in RE. You will do better most of the time to expand your network to serve more demands than to over-build a particular City beyond what is needed "right now" - so have enough Platforms to serve current demand rates but don't overbuild until needed, but expand to a new City or needed resource.

Once current Platforms in a City no longer keep up with demand, add more. You quickly get to the full 8 Platform limit (2 Large Stations, 4 Platforms each, 16 places to connect.)

As far as adding service in terms of more trains or more Platforms, if you are not meeting demand, you can add another train. If trains are often waiting for Platform access, you need to add more Platforms. Occasional waiting is ok, but if there is always a cue, the Platform is overloaded.

Expand as needed to fill demands without much waiting. Forget the numerical metrics :)

Point to point is great. Nominally use separated track not connected to other things and 2 stop only routes. This is not strict, but doing so you can use a single switch to move trains in and out of each Platform, and that short distance makes swaps faster, maximizing throughput.

You can combine 2-3 lower demand routes onto a Platform, but high demand routes (City to City Express) justify a full Platform to themselves, maybe even 2-3 for large Cities.

[Maxim]

After placing the first station, all similarities between you and other players are almost non-existent.. different solutions to the same starting point exist everywhere.


Learning to open the train "rail-line" "edit station" menu for the "origination point" and "destination point" allows you to pre-program what a train will pick up or drop off.

And following that, this allows you to run different trains from the same warehouse to any city, same city, or different cities in any order... but having them specialize in what & where they are going.

See image: I set this train to pick up wheat and cattle, but none of the other items.. notice the wheat & cattle have green arrows for priority pickup..
https://puu.sh/HQhfb/ffe9ab7e4d.jpg


Over, under & throughways..
https://puu.sh/HQh9a/87ccda465a.png

Have you seen this video?
https://youtu.be/PZhN5U0cNq8

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by Maxim:

Have you seen this video?
https://youtu.be/PZhN5U0cNq8

An impressive record to be sure...but that much infrastructure seems like overkill? If this is an example of 'point to point', then that sure takes up a ton of space for a lot of underutilized rail. (And does he even need that many warehouses?)

[The_10th_Man]

Putting world records aside and getting back to your original questions, my strategy is to use twin stations as much as possible and as early as possible. I also use warehouses as a key strategy as well, but mostly later in the game.

The benefits of using twin stations early in the game are:

1) Blocking competitors from building stations in your city. Just an extra $40k station will do it.

2) Blocking factories from building in the space you will need for a second station later in the game. It's very expensive buying a level 3 factory so that you can pay $200k to knock it down, then build your second station, then rebuild the factory and expand it back to level 3. Better to just spend $40k early and reserve the space and even earn some money, which leads to....

3) Setting up express lines between cities. Freight pays $2k per wagon upon delivery and there is no payment for returning to the farm empty. Passenger and mail lines pay by distance and time taken and express passenger and mail trains get paid bonuses. Even in the first month of game time, an express line can pay $40k or more each way. So even giving them a dedicated small station to small station single line can seriously increase your cash flow early in the game.

On this last point, when you link any two cities together, before you send any raw materials to the new city, try immediately creating a dedicated passenger and mail train going between them with dining car, mail car and caboose and see what a difference it makes to your cash flow.

The main uses of warehouses are:

1) Keeping freight trains out of your cities. Having a large warehouse on each side of your biggest cities will double the number of lines that are servicing the city and the express trains that need to go into the city will have less traffic to contend with. They will also enable you to keep stocks of food and raw materials on hand for the city to take as it needs. You don't get paid for deliveries to warehouses, but you do get paid when the connected city draws down on the available stock.

2) Consolidating stock from a group of farms. Instead of running multiple trains along long lines into one or more cities, you can run them to a warehouse built halfway between the nearest city and the cluster of farms. You then set up one or more trains running constantly from the warehouse to the city to take whatever stock the city needs most urgently into the city. So instead of running six trains into the one city with one type of good each, you have one or two trains delivering six types of goods each from the warehouse to the city.

When you need the same goods for another city, you can connect that city to the single warehouse, not to the six farms. Then you have 2-4 trains running between the two cities and the one warehouse instead of 12 (or 18, or 24) trains running between the six farms and the two cities, with still only having six trains running between the six farms and the warehouse.

3) Clearing out excess stocks of manufactured goods. If your city is producing goods that other cities aren't demanding yet, the city stock of that good will fill up quickly and the factory will stop producing. When the factory stops, your trains will not pick up the raw materials and your cash flow will suffer.

The solution is to build a warehouse in the countryside, assign that good to it, along with foods from close by farms that you also connect. Then run a service out to it with the manufactured good and it bring back food on the return trip.

The service delivering the manufactured good will not earn cash for deliveries to the warehouse, but it will bring back food that does earn cash on delivery and it will keep the factories running, which keeps the raw material services bringing raw materials to the factory, which means you get paid instead of those services running empty wagons.

So if you have a task that requires a certain number of goods to be manufactured (not transported) and the factory is not producing, this may be the solution you need.

As far as track utilisation rates are concerned, I don't take any notice of them. Better to get the infrastructure in place as you go by only buying stations with signalling controls for your first city stations and then running twin lines between all stations (city and farm) with multiple directional signals installed on all lines. In the middle stages the blockages are mostly solved by simply expanding the stations to large size. Then you won't run into blocked lines until much later in the scenario when you have the money to throw at the problem and get things moving again. By then you should have 200 plus services running and even if 30 trains are blocked, you will still have 170 plus services earning money for you while you fix the blockage.

For the directional signals, make sure that you keep the directions consistent throughout the whole map. If you have the east-west lines run the top line to the west and the bottom line to the east, and have the north-south lines running the left side south and the right side north, you will then find that the trains run smoother for you and it will be much easier to join twin lines together when making bypasses, etc...

Hope this all helps you get through the scenarios easier.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by gfe90604:

<snip to save space>

A few questions based on your reply:

- Do "Express" locomotives specifically earn a bonus?
For instance, I have the Iron Duke unlocked, which is "Mixed" but superior to all other locomotives of my era including the best Express locomotive (Firefly, I think?) - except for being 1 mph slower and having 3% less passenger satisfaction. It has *much* better traction, acceleration, and reliability. Unless there's a specific bonus granted to Express trains, that 1 mph/3% surely isn't worth it?

- What about just 1 Large station and a large warehouse or two? (with a small station to 'block' if need be?)

- Is there any reason to not just deliver *all* cargo to warehouses rather than to a station?

- Is there any easier way to manage the 200+ trains than one by one?

[Thineboot]

"Express" locomotives is just a general tag, like "mixed" and "freight", to give you a hint how to use it. You'll end up using the fastest engine for express goods (P&M) eventually and a decent, cheap (early game) freight engine for freight.
Obviously speed matters to get an Express rating (lightning bolt). Unless you're going up and down instead of avoiding inclines the fastest engine will suit best (in most cases - never say never ;).

Blocking competition by adding a second 40K station... try using rails, that's even cheaper ;)

There are simply too much goods for one or two Warehouses. And you don't get any bonus by delivering to Warehouses. No refrigerator cars, no Guards, just a flat 2K per car.

Use a naming convention that suits you. Sorting will be much easier.

[The_10th_Man]

Apologies for the delay in this response. I am Australian, so I am usually late to the discussions and by the time I see any messages sent back, it's usually a day later. Apologies also for the length of these additional responses (there's more than one). The express train factor is important enough to give you the full enchilada and I'll try to answer the warehouse questions as best I can.

There's a significant difference between an express locomotive and an express service. Generally speaking the passenger services pay more than the freight services do, because as mentioned previously, they pay by distance travelled and time taken. However, assigning an express train to a passenger service does not automatically make that service an express service.

For a service to become an 'express service, it must be travelling only between two cities (they do not need to be neighbouring cities, but neighbouring cities are where your services will be able to consistently earn the express status) and it needs to get there without stopping for anything other than water, oil and sand. It also needs to hit the current speed record. Assigning engineers and stokers that have lightning bolts symbols on their profiles help you get there. If you also can find both a security guard and a porter that provide personality bonuses to the stoker and engineer, plus a caboose that multiplies all their bonus by 20%, you will really push the service up to the speed that it needs to get the bonus (the personnel component is vital in meeting the random express service tasks that you will keep seeing pop up above pairs of cities during scenarios).

When any of your services achieve the express status, you will see a lightning bolt added to the service's information in the train drop down menu found at the top left hand side of screen. When there is a lightning bolt in place, the service will be earning a bonus payment for every journey (in both directions). If you are playing as Beatrix, you will get a double express bonus, but every other character will receive the normal bonus, which is still substantially better than a freight service pays.

For example, I'm currently playing in the second year of the hibernation scenario as the scientist. My most profitable freight train is making just over $2k per week and my least profitable passenger train is making just over $3k per week. I only have 3 express lines at this early stage (out of 9 passenger services), but they are making $7k, $8k and $10k respectively per week. My research is hitting the point where I have a series of 6% increases lined up for mail and passenger tickets for only 100 research points each, so those figures are about to jump substantially. However, this is also with all services still operating with the same model of mixed purpose locomotive. I haven't reached the point where my research will release a specialist express locomotive yet.

Services will gain and lose and then regain the express status depending on how their last journey went. It is not something that they keep forever once it has been attained. You don't know which ones will hit the status first, so the first thing I do when connecting two cities is create a new passenger train going out from each end of the line and let them run free before I do anything else. Since the new cities are often small, they won't fill the passenger trains immediately, so I always add the mail, dining and caboose wagons to ensure that I get 20% extra from everything that they pick up and deliver. With passenger trains running from both directions, you also don't lose as many passengers to the road transport option as they won't be waiting as long to get a train. As the city grows, start adding more passenger services to the dedicated passenger lines. You can potentially have multiple express services running between two cities, always full and always earning bonuses.

Whenever one of your competitors manages to gain access to a faster train through the research panel. You will also see the lightning bolt hovering over your express services in an orange triangle with a message that reads something like 'express service in danger due to faster trains being available'. This is warning you that your service will lose its express bonus if you don't buy a faster train for it.

If you get the bigger funds flowing through having multiple express services running, you will also have plenty of funds to upgrade your fleet as soon as these faster trains become available. Until the specialised express locomotives come online, I often deliberately keep my freight services running on older trains so that I can differentiate them from the passenger and mail trains and replace all the passenger trains with the express model to try and gain more express services from the existing services immediately.

Freight and mixed services can also achieve express status early in the scenarios, but generally speaking it requires the train to get up to the maximum speed record of the fastest available trains before the lightning bolt appears and the bonus is paid. This is the main reason why the newspapers report when a new speed record is hit and the main reason why you need to give them an unimpeded run between cities to allow them to hit the bonus requirements.

Once the express locomotives become available (through research) the freight and mixed services will fall out of their express status. From that point onwards, you really need to keep express locomotives assigned exclusively to all your passenger and mail services and mixed purpose locomotives assigned to every other service (unless it is a train running over a mountain, then you need the grunt of a specialist freight locomotive).

Answers to the warehouse questions to follow.....

[toosimple08]

I'm running two stations only because I want city to city connection with 4 parallel tracks, 2 for passenger and 2 for cargo. And no warehouse at all. I'm still at early stage with 100k population in starting city but it seems working just fine.

[The_10th_Man]

Q: What about just 1 Large station and a large warehouse or two? (with a small station to 'block' if need be?)

A: Warehouses can't be built in the green circle of the cities, so they can't be used to reserve ground in the circle. You could use rails to reserve ground from factories, but that will still leave enough space for a competitor to place a station on a fractional edge of the big green circle. When you have two stations already in the city, they simply can't build a station in that city.

When I first started playing this game, I didn't get the point of warehouses. I was only thinking of them in the context of the Patrician and Port Royale universes. If you have been playing games like those, you have to break the mindset of the warehouse being in the city and start thinking of them in a different context. They are distribution hubs that can be connected to a city, but not placed in a city.

Q: Is there any reason to not just deliver *all* cargo to warehouses rather than to a station?

A: You don't get paid for deliveries to a warehouse. It's not that you don't get bonuses for those deliveries, they simply do not pay you for those deliveries anymore (they used to, but no more since an upgrade). If you have the warehouse connected to a city, you will see a little $2k message floating up into the air each time the city takes something out of stock, whether you have a train on one of the platforms or not, but you are not paid when you deliver wagons to the warehouse.

They also don't count as connections to farms when you have to meet a task for connecting a certain number of farms to your network. You need to connect a station to the farm for the connection to count towards the task's requirement.

Early in the game, you need to earn cash and grow populations by delivering goods directly into the city. Later in the game, knock yourself out with as many warehouses as you like, they really come into their strengths at that point. But unless you are using them to clear out city inventory of manufactured goods for an early game task, I wouldn't recommend using them until you have a lot of cash in hand and a need to take a whole group of train services out of the city platforms at once.

Q: Is there any easier way to manage the 200+ trains than one by one?

A: If you've set up your infrastructure right from day one, more than 95% of a fleet of 200 trains (sometimes 300 plus) will be set and forget. You will find that you really only need to pay attention to the services that are required to meet your tasks and those that have exclamation marks popping up above them. It's when you have 20 of them in a line, all with exclamation marks that you need to zoom in and see where the problem is.

The most important factors in running big fleets efficiently are signalling and placing maintenance buildings on farm stations.

Maintenance sheds: if you are only adding maintenance sheds to city stations, all of your trains can only be maintained in the cities and all your city stations will become clogged with trains being serviced. Placing sheds on the farm stations (and warehouses later) will allow the majority of the maintenance to be done outside of the cities.

Signalling: I'd suggest always setting up multiple directional signals on all lines. The game instructions don't really tell you how to do this. However, once you get the hang of it, it is simple.

Hold down control and shift at the same time and left click on a track. Then go to the neighbouring track and do the same thing, but roll the mouse wheel a couple of clicks first to point the signal in the other direction before left clicking.

When you have four parallel lines, the game will try to make you place the top two running in one direction and the lower two running in the other direction. Things will run much better if you run the top one in the same direction as the third line and the second line in the same direction as the fourth line. Whichever direction you start using on your first track must then stay consistent across every new track you lay down.

If you follow the directions provided at the end of my first response, you will find that your rails join neatly with the competitor's networks when you take them over. If you run all lines in the opposite directions suggested, you will not be able to join them neatly. Having said that, I normally liquidate everything when I take over a competitor. Their networks are rubbish.

Generally speaking though, if you aren't consistently using signals like this yet, I'd suggest getting more practice in with them. If you aren't building connections using all twin tracks between all stations and following a consistent pattern of signal placement, you will not be able to set and forget and you will constantly be micro-managing a lot more services than you need to.

This also comes with practice. I have 600 hours of experience and I didn't play this game for more than a year before coming back to it recently. I see others who bought the game in early release having more than 2K hours each.

Hope this has all helped you out...

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by gfe90604:

(snipped first reply)

The "Express status" terminology does confuse things here a bit, that's on me. I am referring to the "Express/Mixed/Freight" labels, specifically. And I do understand the Express *status* does have its own 10% bonus.

You say the 'mixed' (and freight) locomotives will fall out of 'express status' favor. But what about this case of the Iron Duke in the British scenario? It's both cheaper and better than all other locomotives available, and is only surpassed by the best 'Express' class locomotive by 1 mph and 3% passenger favor. So, again, I need to know specifically whether that 'Express' class confers a bonus in comparison to 'Mixed', or if I am better off sticking with the Iron Duke for all routes.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by PoRo Airi Akitsuki:

I'm running two stations only because I want city to city connection with 4 parallel tracks, 2 for passenger and 2 for cargo. And no warehouse at all. I'm still at early stage with 100k population in starting city but it seems working just fine.

How do you handle separation of cargo & passenger using 4 tracks? Cargo will inevitably need to come from both sides of the line - do you prefer building bridges/tunnels to get to the correct side of the mainline? Do you just build full crossings and take the potential hit to passenger/mail traffic?

Personally I've arrived at using 6 tracks: 2 'mainline', and 2 'above' and 'below' for regional routes I don't want to interrupt the mainline express, whether cargo or mixed passenger + mail.

[TheGreenFellow]

Originally posted by gfe90604:

A: Warehouses can't be built in the green circle of the cities, so they can't be used to reserve ground in the circle. You could use rails to reserve ground from factories, but that will still leave enough space for a competitor to place a station on a fractional edge of the big green circle. When you have two stations already in the city, they simply can't build a station in that city.

I wasn't meaning 'reserving' a city here, I was referring to fulfilling the city's demands sufficiently. I'm aware warehouses can't be used for 'reserving' purposes. (Buying competitors out is the 'easier' solution, in my experience so far.)

A: You don't get paid for deliveries to a warehouse. It's not that you don't get bonuses for those deliveries, they simply do not pay you for those deliveries anymore (they used to, but no more since an upgrade). If you have the warehouse connected to a city, you will see a little $2k message floating up into the air each time the city takes something out of stock, whether you have a train on one of the platforms or not, but you are not paid when you deliver wagons to the warehouse.

The long story made short is this, then? "You still get paid for that cargo *when consumed by the city*, but the 'food car' bonus cannot apply to warehouse deliveries."

They also don't count as connections to farms when you have to meet a task for connecting a certain number of farms to your network. You need to connect a station to the farm for the connection to count towards the task's requirement.

That is certainly a useful tidbit to note, though it does seem a bit strange.

A: If you've set up your infrastructure right from day one, more than 95% of a fleet of 200 trains (sometimes 300 plus) will be set and forget. You will find that you really only need to pay attention to the services that are required to meet your tasks and those that have exclamation marks popping up above them. It's when you have 20 of them in a line, all with exclamation marks that you need to zoom in and see where the problem is.

So the answer to my question, specifically, is that *no*, there is no easier way to manage so many trains at once. Certainly organization and properly planning can help try to avoid the issue...but the issue of doing things 1 by 1 if lots of change is needed, remains. Oh well.

Maintenance sheds: if you are only adding maintenance sheds to city stations, all of your trains can only be maintained in the cities and all your city stations will become clogged with trains being serviced. Placing sheds on the farm stations (and warehouses later) will allow the majority of the maintenance to be done outside of the cities.

I hadn't considered the benefit of keeping maintenance outside city stations, I'll have to try this.

[chaney]

Only time for a quick note with some corrections:

The Express Status requires neither a record time nor the fastest train available. The exact mechanics are not clear, but "fast" round trips seem to be the key. The in-game information is incorrect.

Warehouses used for distribution are generally not efficient. Warehouses built by the player to expand the number of Platforms available to serve a City or to accumulate goods from far away locations work for those purposes.

[toosimple08]

Originally posted by TheGreenFellow:

Originally posted by PoRo Airi Akitsuki:

I'm running two stations only because I want city to city connection with 4 parallel tracks, 2 for passenger and 2 for cargo. And no warehouse at all. I'm still at early stage with 100k population in starting city but it seems working just fine.

How do you handle separation of cargo & passenger using 4 tracks? Cargo will inevitably need to come from both sides of the line - do you prefer building bridges/tunnels to get to the correct side of the mainline? Do you just build full crossings and take the potential hit to passenger/mail traffic?

Personally I've arrived at using 6 tracks: 2 'mainline', and 2 'above' and 'below' for regional routes I don't want to interrupt the mainline express, whether cargo or mixed passenger + mail.

Well it comes down to proper planning of stations and tracks, which can be painful sometimes. For example, with city A on east and city B on west, if more rural resources on the north and one of two resources on the south, the northern 2 tracks of the total 4 will be freight lines, and southern 2 will be passenger lines. Resources on the south will be connected to and intersect with the passenger lines, but only at the exit (or entrance) of the station, to minimize the impact.

Btw, I never build bridges or tunnels just for interactions. I mean building 2 stations with signal tower and 4 parallel tracks are already big investment. I can't afford bridges or tunnels, especially in early game.