Is it me or is time completely broken now and the speeding up option is not even fast enough.

You have to compromise there in some way. If it were real time (or closer to real time), you would have two options:

The game time passes incredibly slow. It’d take ages to even reach the year 1900.

Or, the vehicles would run incredibly fast. Let’s say that your bus would, in reality, take one hour to complete its route. On slow speed, the game takes only seconds for one day. Your bus would have to run fast enough to complete the whole route 24 times in about two seconds.

Maybe take the individual bus or train as a symbol, or an abstraction. It’s not really an individual bus but a game representation of the buses running that line during a few months. Or something like that.

That’s a compromise all these games have to make, not only transport simulations. In Civilization, it can take you hundreds of years to move an army from A to B. On the plus side, you don’t have to actually play for 6000 years, which would be quite difficult. 😉

I don’t mind that routes take X months, what I don’t like is the speed at which you’re in 2015, it’s far too fast. I would like a modifier so that the game calendar runs at around 50-75% of it’s current slowest.

Even with the small amount of trains, and even smaller road amount of road vehicles, I feel rushed in to upgrading to newer models. I would like to enjoy each era for a much longer time (at least double). Now, when DLC and Mods become more common, it will feel even worse. You’ll be passing decades so quickly that you don’t get to enjoy the transition of the era to the modern vehicles of the time.

I would also like all calculation to remain the same, as this would have little effect on a slower time progression. It would certainly not make it easier, if you’re going to gain money, yes you gain twice as much in a game year if running at half the speed, BUT you still play for the same length of real time as you would normally. With the same token, you’d lose double the money if you’d made a mistake.

at the moment, if you want to enjoy a ride with a train you are wasting many months or even years on longer routes

together with the horrible time it takes to load / unload big numbers of passengers / cargo, this are the 2 biggest problems the game has