Try placing the stationn further from the “old” town. Then build a grid of biggest roads with empty blocks, the game will populating these emty blocks anyway as the town grows. So you get a grid of roads that look like New York instead of some small english village. By placing roads yourself you are sculpting the future look of the city.
The game is so proud that it can have curved roads the automaktic system makes a lot of them and dont seem to build big avenues.
So do it yourself.
And you need to prepare the are with the terrain modeling tools and create flat area. IRL station seldome have any incline it is usually 0%.
Also when you drag lines you see the game carving into the terrain or putting a lot of sand under the tracks and that is because IRL 3% incline is considered steep. Any steeper then that you usually use helper locomotives that need to be attached before the climb if the climmb is steeper then 3%.