Please do not understand me wrong, I do not says trains are completely useless. But they get useful very late. Here are some examples for connections could be done with trains:
- high capacity goods lines (e.g. wood to saw mill, oil to refinery)
- inter city connections, after 1906 with 100km/h trains (1 -2 Cities distance, like (Cities A-B-C-D) A->D, A->C)
Strange thing I noticed: There are small passenger railcars in game, they would make much sens to replace the high-duty trams, but there are no small stations available to fit them. Building a 160m platform for 15-30m railcar is just uhhm, stupid.
1. Having more running cost on trams makes huge loss for some In-city branch lines.
nope. In total the tram has 1/4 of the running costs of a similar train. – Even with a 12-car train the running cost is 1.33 for each passenger seat, an equal amount of trams has 0.97 per passenger. (And this do not include the running costs for the stations! Neither you can fill this huge train as easy as the trams.)
2. Trains are much faster than trams from 1930s, and not affected by private car traffic
They are. By people choosing car, not train. The really funny thing I experienced is people do not use private cars, if there are intercity-trams. Opposite is true for trains. (BTW: another big issue: The assumes from 1930 that every citizen has a private car…. Its like “ohhh. It is 1930, let us all buy a car! I take 8 for my family, so everybody has its own!”
Faster means more opportunity to earn income and grow cities, essential to build big cities.
Try trams. You will see the cities grow even better for some reason. I had cities grown to pop. 1000+ in 1866 only with passenger trams on hard focusing on one city, something I never managed with trains.
(you can still use trams for not-so-big adjacent cities, but that’s realistic so no problem. separate cities are much better with faster trains)
I say this is just wrong. Give trams a try and you will see. Later 60km/h trams are capable of connecting 4 near cities or 2-3 “far” cities…
3. Tram/Bus stops have very limited capacity while train stations have enough capacity to serve one line, especially big one.
Right, but 1 train = 14 trams, still much cheaper. Please have a look at the numbers I gave above.
4. Trams are often ‘stuck’ with road traffic AND public transportation itself, making it annoying especially on large maps where busy checking other lines and building more lines.
My experience from my tram fever games is: there is much less to no private traffic, when using enough buses and trams. – With trams only you can reach up to 98% coverage…
5. Trams are even not enough capacity for in-city lines on big cities (over 1500 pops) around year 1950, They even have less than 20s frequency and not enough.
Right. There is a point (around 1880-1890 in my games) where a single tram line is maxed out by cities with 1200+ pop. But try 2-5 separate line connecting cities each on its own road each. Works perfectly fine up to 3000+.