I see what you’re saying but building is quite a bit restrictive which means you need a lot of space for it because of collisions and whatnot. It’s not always simple and practical to build another line next to the existing one. For a junction sometimes you use like 1/4 of the map with curves and all and that’s a bit excessive. I agree that in real life building such things is difficult and painful but I don’t wish to replicate all the problems of real life in a game 🙂
Currently I try and build trains because I like them, not because it’s worth it. I’m not saying I necessarily want to run 200 (or 1000) trains on a map like in Openttd but it would be great to have the space and the financial gain to build and use so much more trains than at the moment. I play on medium. I find it that for industry it’s only worth it to use trains when I centralize the production and I feed raw mats to a factory that serves multiple cities (4-8), and even then only for the raw mats part. In my current game (small map) I made 6 train lines that connect my cities to a main one. It’s a hit and miss, I just rebuilt stuff and bought more modern trains and I lose like 10m-15m per month from all these trains. I’m sure it weill be better after like 10 years…
I’d generally like if we were able to use more lines, more trains, being Train Fever you know. Such restrictive building, expensive running costs, and having to upgrade manually are too much of a pain really. Rebuilding will always be an option, perhaps if we could see the speed restrictions of a line after it was built not just in building tool would help making the decision of upgrade vs rebuild, then it would be a real option.