The above are great tips. Thank you.
When I played my first game I made big mistakes mainly trying to connect my towns and cities. Obviously in the 1850’s travel between places wasn’t popular and no one used my services and I borrowed and borrowed just to stay afloat. Once I figured that the townsfolk were happy to remain in their home towns I started a new game with much better results.
I simply visited each city in turn and looked at the distribution of dwellings, industrial, commercial and leisure buildings. Once I worked out where people wanted to get from and to it was easy to create bus routes accordingly. I then constructed a vehicle depot next to the road in a free spot and then went around my route dropping off bus stops at appropriate distances. I then set up the route linking all the bus stops and finally purchased my vehicles. For most lines I found that 4 vehicles were sufficient. I started with stage coaches and moved on to the steam bus after 15 years. There’s maintenance to pay on the road depots so only build one per city.
This simple start to the game means that in 25 years I’ve gone from the original $3m to $9m just running bus services. All routes are running at a profit and all are now operating the steam buses. It becomes a bit of a chore replacing vehicles at the end of their life but costs go up if you don’t.
I may have missed the obvious but I did cause myself a problem when returning a vehicle to the depot for replacement. When you send it to the depot the Line Number disappears and so I soon learnt to make a note of the Line Number before returning the vehicle to the depot .
With my funds increasing I feel more confident to move on to linking the industries as described so well by lightrail in his post above.