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I agree that the freight system is bit weird but I have had some success at setting up line-haul freight trains- I set up a main trunk line served by frequent mixed freight trains (carriages for all commodities) with truck routes or branch lines feeding each industry to a local freight station on the trunk line.
In my current game, I run the trunk line completely across the entire map with enough trains to maintain a 2-minute frequency. The trains are barely profitable, but when you combine them with the feeder routes, the whole freight system makes good profits. I found that a small number of industries quickly expanded to full production (400 units) but most others chug along (10-25 units) and the result is that trains are full for some parts of the route, empty for some parts and most of the time run with small load of all commodities.
However, the big plus that I found with this model is that every city along the route receives goods and so grows- which makes the passenger service more profitable.
I’ve also made this model work using a central freight yard and running multiple trunk line from it to the different regions on the map. Its the only way that I have found so far to create a destination for goods that can take hundreds of units at a time (a requirement if you want to run long freight trains).
A solution that I have used for this case is to lay the tunnel first and then at both ends, build a short section of triple track. Then when you build by connecting the third tracks to each other, you get two single tunnels that are parallel. More tracks can be added to increase the separation between the parallel tunnels.
This also works for bridges where a second track causes a conflict with the river underneath.
A serious problem with the AI for the BE 5/6 Cobra in traffic is that they can gridlock a town if there are blocks that are shorter than the length of a tram- for instance, a tram enters the block but can’t exit because it is blocked by tram that entered but couldn’t exit because it blocked by one that is blocked by the first tram. Once you get a tram-jam and the centre of a town is blocked, there is no way that I found to fix the situation except sending all trams to the depot and then re-assigning them to routes.
Another improvement that I would suggest is traffic lights to control the flow of pedestrians as well as traffic. When a city gets large, you need a large number of trams running around the stations and there are a large number of pedestrians. It would be better if trams didn’t nudge their way through the constant stream of pedestrians requiring ages for them to clear intersections.
I hadn’t though about the connection to rebuilding the tram routes but this fits what I experience but this fits my experience. I end my games soon after I reach the point of having to re-organize tram routes because of city growth and traffic because the monthly delays get beyond the point of playability.
For example, I was able to reach the “Metropolis” achievement in my last game (about 30 trains, 200 trams, a small map and a powerful laptop) but by the time I gave up on the game, the freezes were lasting around 30 seconds.
