I have a city of about 200,000. The core of the city is pretty dense, however there's a great cargo rail network. Traffic is in the 70% -75% range.

I relocated all my factories to the outskirts of town; they were originally located too close to my downtown and resulted in a traffic nightmare.

My DLC Industry is scattered around the city. I put Warehouses for Processor-created goods in the factory area, and all the factories have plenty of supplies. No issue there.

My issue is many (around 20) commercial buildings complain about not enough goods. I have placed Commercial Goods warehouse around these locations, which are also close to cargo rail. But the problem persists.

In addition there are general industrial zone and specialized industrial zone areas that are very close to the commercial zones. At the opposite corner of the map from the factories is a DLC Cargo Airport. (I once had a rail cargo airport but it created so much train congestion, I turned it off, though it's still on the map)

So because my factory goods are located so far away, I had the bright idea of using Transfer Manger settings to restrict Factory Good Buildings to send goods only to the local warehouses, and then I set the warehouses to only delivery to nearby cargo rail.

I have also enabled the "Warehouse First" setting.

Is this a good strategy? How do transfers work when a commercial good request comes to a warehouse that will only dispatch to a cargo rail?

Should I turn off Exporting for those Warehouses?