Hint: Goods give best profit. Bus lines in the range of one city are about zero-plus at the best.

* When you start a new game, don’t do anything for 1 year but put it on high speed.  (Or do that now).   Now pause it.  Turn on the Cargo overlay.  You’ll be surprised how many industries are doing nothing but there’s some materials and goods moving from some raw materials, to processing plants, and on to towns.  That’s where you want to set up your transportation.  Be sure to use a cargo station and put it near the industrial part of town.
* Trains aren’t always the answer.  My trains running a forest>sawmill>town was losing money fast.  Switched to horse-drawn wagons and was making some nice profit.  (This was early in the game though).
* Once you have a goods route running and making money, then you can think about setting up a ‘bus’ route (well, stagecoach) in town to connect all the parts.  You might have to add some additional road at the end of roads to connect them together and make your routing easier.  Plan ahead- you’ll need to add a passenger station near your residential or tourist section.
* Making money now?  If you have more than 3 million, pay your loan down.  That’s costing you $30K a year.
* Pick a good size nearby town.  Add a ‘bus’ service to it.  Once it’s up and running profitability, add passenger station near the residential or tourist sections of both towns.  Now you can add a passenger train between the two, with the ‘busses’ feeding passengers to the stations.
* Just remember 3 things: 1) the shorter the route, the less cars you need, the shorter the time it takes to complete the route, the less the expenses.  2) Start small and insure it’s profitable before you move on.  3) Never be afraid to ditch something that isn’t profitable and try something else.

Start in a sort of big(ger) town (use sort-on-inhabitants in the town list), search for a nice place for a passenger station, also look around to see how many connection you need in the future and drop a 2, 3, 4 or 5 platform station. Also target a town nearby for your first railway connection.

Create from this first station a busline in town 1. Trough in around 6 buses or horse wagons.

Go the next target town. Do the same in the target town, create a station and busline.

Wait a while until the buslines are making money.

Create a railway between the stations and buy a train and set-up a line.

Most of this (if not all) can be done with the 2 Mil. starting money)

Wait now until the railway is making money, usually within a few years ….

The start looking for your first (wagon) connections on goods ….

I start in 1950 then find a town with one near by then set up a bus route in each and run 2 or 3 busses clockwise and then the same anti clockwise. then I create a train link but it always makes a loss and just gets worse. Does some one have a seed that they have made money on and I will try on there.

thanks

upload pic

If starting in 1900, get a couple of truck lines going for goods and then build a small passenger line, the same as above then and you should see steady growth.

Make sure you have the balance mod installed, makes the game make MUCH more sense economically.