Replacing a road line with a rail.

[InitusNovus]

Hello. I have a difficulty replacing a road line with a rail line.

 

I usually play hard, large maps. And I start with setting up truck lines, and then set bus lines between cities.

 

And I extend the bus lines, so lines connect 3~4 cities each, and make intra-city bus lines.

 

In this stage, the lines are profitable. Inter-city bus lines make a profit up to 200k, truck lines earn 100k~400k.

 

When I try to replace road lines with rail lines, however, it is difficult to make a profit.

 

How do I do?

[ErstO]

I haven’t started a lot of maps,  but I would say your problem is competition,  you have already given your peeps a cheap way of traveling between cities with bus lines 

Have seen this with cargo,  when I get a cargo line profitable with trucks and want to replace it with rail,  I have to cut back on the number of trucks or even remove the truck routes completely before the rail lines see profit.

I never run buses between cities,  I only use them to feed peeps to the train stations and between homes and work.

You can try cutting back the number of bus’s so the route will take longer then the train, or cut all the bus’s so the peeps have no option then to take the train.

[InitusNovus]

There is no competition between buses and trains. I delete the bus lines before resume the game paused for constructing rail road. If there was a competition, it would be between a train and a personal car.

[Jythier]

Trains need lots of cars to be filled to profit.  So when you have a bus, most likely it’s filling every time.  But with a train, it’s not going to fill unless the station is positioned well OR you have feeder bus lines within the city.   Train lines tend to be outside the city and you’ll want it near the part of the city (if it’s nice and separated) that has residents or industry, depending on what you’re doing, but a bus line to the other segments is key too.

From one city to another next to it, you’re going to end up with a break even point of X passengers per train.  You want to be able to carry twice that amount.  The trip is going to take a certain amount of time, and likely if you’re past 1900 you have a fast train and will only need one train for the route.  If you’re going to 3 or 4 cities you might want 3 trains to run it.  Regardless, you want your frequency to be low enough that you have probably at least 5-8 minutes to walk/take buses/etc to get to and go from the station.  So if you have a 12 minute round trip you need to run at least 2 trains, because the round trip + the freq is how long your passenger will be waiting on + riding the train max.  So if a train arrives every 6 minutes, and travels to the other town in 6 minutes, you have a 12-minute wait for the train.  Less wait is better but less wait costs a lot of money, ie, the entire cost of a train, and reduces the per-train amounts of things being shipped, even though more people might take your lines.  Keep in mind also that you have to adjust your buses so that you have enough that they can drop enough people off within the time frame to fill your train.  If not you’re not going to be able to fill the trains even if people want to ride.

As for cargo, cargo isn’t like people.  You build a station by the raw material.  You build a station by the goods producer.  You need that goods producer to be making a ton of goods.  The most important thing to remember for the line between the two is the 20 minute rule.  As long as your freq with 1 train is under say 18 minutes you’re golden.  You don’t even need a second train, which means less maintenance costs, but a longer train.  That’s a good thing.  Lots of cars.  Start with them so you don’t have to interrupt service.  The goods will wait for you to pick them up.

That sets up the one chain, the other side of the chain I haven’t really mastered yet, to be honest.  But I think what needs to happen is bulkifying the train route.  You want a route that involves a train servicing several towns, because goods don’t bulk up like the raw materials do.  So to get enough to be profitable, you need to run a long train that serves several areas, and then have trucks distribute out from there, or have the one train make several stops (but then it’s running half-full some of the time) and there’s no good back haul either.

But I know it’s possible, at least it was on moderate, but I bet it’s possible on hard too, you just need more bulk and/or more distance between the original station and the target areas.

[ErstO]

I try to keep passenger train transit times down to 5 minutes or less,  above 5 I can’t get enough peeps to make a profit,  just add another train on the same route to lower the time.

Have also noticed some routes take a few years before the peeps get in the habit of using the line,  one advantage of starting out in the 1800’s  it’s easy to make enough extra money to wait out the loss until a new line is profitable.

[Author]

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