Here are my suggestions:

• You can only deliver as much goods to a town as it demands.
• Passengers and goods will only make their journey if it takes 20 minutes or less of real-time to complete.
• The journey-time not only depends on how fast a service is, but also how long someone has to wait. It is therefore a good idea to keep the frequency of the services high to reduce waiting-times.
• Passengers or goods will disappear if there is a delay that causes the journey to be longer than 20 minutes, or if the source or destination building is demolished.
• Building a track close to another track double-tracks it (the bit between the two tracks tracks is filled in). You can build any number of parallel tracks this way.
• To build a level-crossing, you must build the rails on top of the road. You cannot build the rails over a segment-boundary in the road, and only one level-crossing per road-segment is allowed. However, double-track (or any number of joined parallel tracks) crossing a road is considered a single level-crossing.
• A bridge can only be built if it has sufficient height clearance over what it is trying to cross. Likewise, tunnels can only be built if they are deep enough.
• When building a road, press ‘M’ and ‘N’ to change the humpiness of the road. If the road is long enough, it will become a bridge or tunnel.
• To double-track a bridge or tunnel, drag the second track from near the start of a single-track bridge/tunnel all the way to the end.
• When building, you can force a track-segment to be straight by building a long track-segment and moving it until it snaps to a straight length of track (it helps if the camera is zoomed right in and tilted to the horizon in the direction of the start of the track).
• The altitude of station depends on the altitude of the small road segment coming out of the station. This is where you want to build your hill/depression to change the altitude of the station.
• When building a station, if it is not connected to anything, press ‘M’ and ‘N’ to rotate the station. Holding down ‘SHIFT’ while doing so will give finer control of the rotation.
• When building track or stations, holding down ‘SHIFT’ will disable all snapping except for the ability to build straight tracks.
• If you have a large segment of railway track, but only want to remove a small part, place a signal where you want to split the segment and then place another signal nearby. You have now split the segment. Likewise, you can do something similar with roads by building a junction where you want to split the road-segment.
• You can only have one bus-stop per road-segment. To get round this, split the segment into two.
• When building a new road-segment joined to an existing road-segment and starting from the existing road-segment, the position of the mouse relative to the purple circle can change the segment’s curvature.
• You can use the raise/lower terrain tools to create land-slopes steeper than the slopes to the side of the track you get when normally building track.
• Train-routes are automatically worked out, but if you want fine control over the exact path a train will take (eg. select the exact platform a train will use), make use of waypoints. Waypoints can be added to routes just like stations. As well as regular waypoints, signals can also be used as waypoints.
• Secondary industries have a hint at the bottom of their ‘details’ tab. This gives a hint as to how to make the industry more productive (eg. ship more goods, deliver more raw-materials).
• There are plenty of downloadable mods and enhancements, including new rolling-stock, buildings, decorations, maps, and even gameplay-enhancements. See http://www.train-fever.net

These tips could either be displayed when loading a map, or as a dialog that appears when a map has loaded. If the latter, there should be an option to not show the tip-dialog, but then if an update adds new tips, it should re-enable the tips (and display the first new tip when it does so). Perhaps there could also be a user-editable tips-file (which is separate from the game’s built-in tips-file, because this could be updated with a patch). This user-editable tips file could even be downloaded in case a third-party is maintaining a list of tips.

If you have any ideas of your own for such tips, please post them in a reply.

i feel like some of you experiance problems to get started.

So here are some effective tricks and tips i have worked out and be able to share with you.

First of all i want to say that i enjoy this game very much, and i just did waited like for years for a game like this to appear to us.

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If you feel like abusing of bugs is not what you want to get started, you might stop reading here, cause i cant hide those parts in this forum.

Letz start:

Do the following setup exactly as mentioned:

1. Mapsize: Middle
2. Difficulty: as you like
3. Mapseed: “Empty” (no seed)
4. Startyear: 1850

That way you come out with a Citytriangle on your right hand, wherein is a simple “Oil to Raffinerie” route. Thats your core! Just be sure you carry that Oil.

Seed: “zero” (no seed) maps are often used by Developers to test some things out, so this is an advantage and we might have to feel as a cheater somehow, anyway. that works.

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=ee43f4-1409866771.jpg

what will happen? Your goods are carried by default to all those 3 cities. So you can get very early a very hight amount of production. Later you will connect those 3 cities and will have a grow in every part.

My second trick to generate a stable fluid income is due to some experimentation. You build a tram line interconnecting for 2 cities (and in those cities. That way i get like 4 Million stable income where trams are just stuffed on the map as they fit.

The third one is some more aggressive. You will have to be fast but you can generate a good income if you get in financal problems:

You have a simple producion to industrie line. Those industries will only produce as much as is taken away by the cities, true? When you transport the goods to town you can call trucks into hall. The goods will just “dissapear” and you can push production beyond limits. I did not lose money due to kill some “goods-fright” so you can go for it if needed.

another pic of later gameplay on the same map:

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=cf8829-1409938281.jpg

Good luck and have fun!