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From what I have seen almost all the american vehicles are both more expensive to buy as well as to maintain compared to the most similar European vehicle in the game, including the train cars. But generally the American vehicles and cars are faster and have more capacity in the case of the trains. So yeah I would say playing with the american vehicles is essentially upping the difficulty of the game.
Sounds to me like you are going over the time limit for the A-C/C-A route. There is an internal 20 minute limit for travel time. If the person estimates they will exceed the 20 minute limit getting to their destination then they won’t choose to make the trip. It could also be the infrequency of the route. You have the same train doing A-B/B-A then doing A-C/C-A from the sounds of it. Anyone wanting to go from A-C/C-A, assuming it is otherwise doable within the time limit, would be waiting so long because of the A-B/B-A part that they would far exceed the 20 minute limit.
Yeah I agree, it is often better to space them yourself to start with as the auto-spacing is simply not aggressive enough so it can take a really long time for it to space them on its own. But again the more stops there are the faster it will be able to space them. Trucks typically only have a few stops on their route so they seem more prone to staying clumped together if I don’t intervene in the beginning. And road traffic in the later game can potentially make the spacing impossible with road vehicles.
But trains I find much easier to control their environment so they seem to space themselves rather well for me. The signal placement gets them quickly to a generally good spacing and then the auto-spacing feature fine tunes it from there so that they are never slowing down or stopping to wait.
I believe the auto-spacing feature does work for trains, just as it does for the road vehicles. It isn’t very aggressive unfortunately. However it is usually easier to see the spacing doing its thing with buses and trams as you typically have a lot more stops on a line for those. This gives the auto-spacing a lot more opportunities to adjust the spacing. At each stop the auto-spacing feature holds the vehicle in the station/bus stop for a couple seconds longer then needed in order to space the vehicle from the one ahead of it until they are evenly spaced. However a single interruption can undo potentially years of auto-spacing work. This is why it is important not to share station platforms with multiple lines or have to many areas where train lines are crossing each others paths and holding each other up. With an uninterrupted line the auto-spacing for trains works just fine. All my train lines, both with loops and straight line multi-city connections, attest to that.
Well admittedly I have only done a loop of 4 towns with a line going in both directions. Perhaps if you make it big enough the auto spacing of vehicles feature stops working for some reason. I had 4 trains going each direction and 4 towns in the loop and they were both making about $2-3 million in the mid game. They were always evenly spaced except for one time when I had one train that was a different speed to the others and he was always tailing another. The signals can be used to compensate for the varying distances between each stop so that the trains are never waiting for the train ahead under any circumstance.
I also have done a loop between 3 towns with both a clockwise and counterclockwise line using 3 trains on each and it too is doing very well, between $1-2 million each and I am still in the early game, the trains only do 45km/h. And they are all perfectly synced so they are evenly spaced at all times.
I will have to try it on a larger scale and see if I come up with similar problems as you describe.
The frequency numbers aren’t as complicated as people might think. If you have one vehicle then the trip length is the frequency number plus half. So a frequency of 5 minutes means a trip length of 7.5 minutes between two points (5 minute wait and 2.5 minute travel to other end). With 2 trains a frequency of 5 minutes means the trip time is 10 minutes (5 minute wait and 5 minute travel).
Syncing vehicles on an uninterupted line is inevitable regardless how many vehicles are on the line, assuming you don’t have vehicles waiting for a full load and you place signals at adequate intervals and the vehicles on a line are all the same. With 2 trains on a line a simple passing lane in the middle of the line means no train will ever be waiting. They will pass by each other as if the other train didn’t even exist. As one train arrives at one end the other train arrives at the opposite end.
I have done both loops and straight lines and had good success with both. I have a straight line route with 4 trains each traveling in a straight line between 4 cities and then reversing and going back the same way (A-B-C-D-C-B-A). The 4 trains are always evenly spaced and no train is ever waiting at a signal for another train. I make as much as $14 million per year from that one line on medium difficulty.
What uzurpator said is certainly one possibility. However what is more likely the issue is that you are supplying a factory with more then one source of the same raw resource. This causes them to compete with each other. If for instance you are supplying a town that requires 40 goods per year then the combined total raw resources of any one type that will be produced will be 40. Better to get the 40 from one source rather then split it between multiple sources.
Every raw resource and factory can produce a maximum of 400 per year. Lets imagine you had a demand very near 400 for goods because you were supplying a bunch of cities with goods from the same sawmill. You could supply that sawmill with 400 logs from one forest or you could collect from two forests and it would split the 400 between them. But it is unlikely to split it evenly. One will likely dominate the other and so one of them will slowly reduce its production while the other increases.
