1. No difference.
2. I don’t think there is any difference. Unlike Transport Tycoon, there is not even a penalty for train departure time. It simply looks awkward when the train doesn’t fit into the station and head of the train may disappear if there is no track further from the station.
3. Feeding goods stimulates town growth as well as providing Intercity passenger transports. Building any station/stop in the town may boom new town building in the nearby land but the effect is only one-off.
4. It will not be 50/50. From my observation, the factory with lower production will further diminish its production rate to give way for the higher production factory. I don’t think the service frequencies are factored in this “competition”. So it’s still better to transport goods from 1 factory instead of 2 or more, especially for cargo railway due to its high running cost. You can have 1 cargo train to serve 2 towns from 1 factory for maximum loading capacity (factory A -> town A -> factory A -> town B ->loop), so it’s 1 locomotive instead of 2 with literally the same total amount of wagons, as long as you don’t break the 20 min rule.
