Clothing to New York

[erndog72]

I need to move 100 loads of clothing to New York. I have a cloth factory and a tailor factory in Baltimore with lots of trains going between them, but no clothing seems to be making its way to NY. I have even designated some as freight-only.
What am I doing wrong?

[Thineboot]

Baltimore consumes Cloth and Clothing, too. Only excess Cloth will be processed by the tailor and only excess Clothing can be shipped toward New York.

Providing more Cotton should help, but that's only based on assumptions. It's one of the trickier tasks as you have to start hauling Cotton early in the game. Otherwise it can take too long to speed up production and thus convincing the private owners to expand the industries.

[chaney]

Yup, bring in a LOT of Cotton to keep the Cloth production maxed out. Eventually the private owners will upgrade production and start making enough to really saturate the demand for that Cloth in Baltimore, so more will be available to the Tailor. Now the Tailor has to make more than enough to saturate Baltimore or none will be available to export to NYC, so keep the Cotton coming in as a high priority.

One general trick is to put key Factories in smaller Cities that don't have so much demand for the product. Sometimes you may even want to stop growing a City to keep the output available for another City --- if you choke off incoming goods you can actually SHRINK a City, which seems cruel but does work in the game.

Getting private owners to upgrade Factories does take some time. Keep them well supplied with inputs and make sure all their products are used and they will upgrade. If you have lots of money, you can buy them out and expand the Factory yourself. That's expensive but sometimes the right decision. If doing that, starve the Factory if an input good first (or let it saturate it's product,) and the purchase price will drop as the Factory is operating at 0% capacity and seen by the game as a poor investment. Cruel and unethical thematically, but for the struggling player, if it makes you happy, the virtual citizens probably don't care.

Prevent trains going to other destinations from taking away the Clothing by prohibiting them in their route setups. That leaves more for NYC. Prioritize the Clothing for NYC trains, of course.

For similar situations, you should make SURE the destination actually demands the good you want to transport. I'm sure that is the case for NYC here, but I'm trying to offer more generally useful tips here.