island cities?

[Agent_Orange]

Has anyone successfully built up an island city, using only water and air connections?
I have struggled with this and it does not seem possible because the citizen acquisition rate is so poor.
I was only successful when taking an existing profitable 6k city and building an island city on the same map. I also connected it with rail to the outside which seems to work better than ships

the general idea is to choose a good sized island or build one near the boarder of the map and place down a ship terminal and a sea way to the edge. I do this by placing 20 coal power plants and then deleting them to raise my exp to level 4 so i can buy tiles and have progression points to buy the sea stuff.