Where Fares Come From

Every coin is a delivered passenger. Passengers need two things at once: a home to leave and somewhere worth going. Get those close to the line and balanced against each other, and a station pays. Two demand-side mistakes quietly drain new players.

A station only sees two cells

Every station scans a short ring around itself, measured in king-move steps, and a building's pull falls off fast with distance.

The first is easy to miss. A building more than two cells from every platform earns you nothing, yet it still bills its full upkeep every period. People do this without noticing. They grow a town outward and the outer ring is dead weight, paying nothing in and money out. Pack homes and workplaces tight against the line. A building in range counts for every one of that line's stations that can reach it, so two close stations both draw on the same few buildings.

Homes make workers, workplaces make jobs

Each building feeds one side of the weekday commute.

Weekday commuting is capped by the smaller of total workers and total jobs. That one fact is the whole balancing act, and it goes wrong in both directions.

Too many workers and nowhere to send them? The extra houses earn nothing, they just bill upkeep. Too many jobs is the gentler error. The empty desks cost you nothing today, they only raise the ceiling for when you add more homes.

Because a House gives 2 residents and a Factory offers 10 jobs, the balance point is roughly five houses per factory, and an Office Block soaks up even more. The common error is a town of mostly homes with a token workplace. With these weights that leaves you worker-rich and job-poor, and demand sits well below what your platforms could carry. Match the two sides.

Density is the other lever this table hides. A House and an Apartment Block sit on the same footprint, but the Apartment carries eight residents against the House's two. Build up rather than out and you raise demand without spreading catchment past the two-cell ring, and without the extra upkeep that sprawl brings. What the denser buildings cost to unlock is in Stations, trains and throughput.

Parks are the weekend trade

Weekday passengers ride home to work and back. On weekends nobody commutes, so a line with no parks runs near empty those days. Parks fix that, and the job count never caps them. Any greenery pulls weekenders, the bigger the more: a shrub or rock draws 5, a Tree 10, a premium tree 15. Aim for park draw roughly equal to your residents, and a weekend day earns about what a weekday does. Put the parks in a station's ring with a home station nearby to send day-trippers, and that stop pays seven days a week.

Two stations, two colours

A passenger only rides between two stations of different colours. You never manage the colours, the game assigns each new station the first free one from a palette of six. Past six stations the colours start to repeat, and a passenger never rides between two stops of the same colour — one more reason a handful of well-fed stations beats a carpet of them. In practice it just means every line wants at least two stops. A lone station has nowhere to send anyone, so it earns nothing.

Small events along the line

A running railway throws off small, occasional events of its own. A rush hour drops a burst of three to five extra passengers onto a line at once. A VIP in a top hat pays three times the fare, so a long trip for them is a small windfall. A station festival doubles every fare delivered to that stop for half a minute — watch for the glow. And a surprise inspection simply bills a routine operating cost, a nudge that unattended running is never quite free. None of them need managing; they are the weather of the line, not the climate.

The demand cap is per line

The demand pool is capped each era (the era timing and targets live in The railwayman's handbook), and the cap is per line, not shared across the empire. The number is a plain head count of commuters a line carries in a run — the smaller of its residents and jobs, from the rule above. So a line is full when it carries that many people, not when it has that many buildings: a town of, say, 100 residents feeding 100 jobs offers 100 commuters, and once the era cap is that or less, the line is at its ceiling.

These are the base caps. The 1993 privatisation permanently lifts them — its ridership surge roughly doubles both the cap and the fare a passenger pays — so a saturated late-game line has new heads to carry again; see The empire and the long century.

Once a single line's workers, jobs and parks fill its own pool, more buildings on that line add zero income and keep adding upkeep. That is the moment to stop feeding it catchment and spend instead on a bigger train to collect the demand, covered in Stations, trains and throughput, and on longer trips to make each fare pay more, in Fares, distance and the shape of a line.

Because the cap is per line, a saturated line is a dead end. That is the whole case for a second and third line: each fills a fresh pool of its own, told in full in The empire and the long century. A granted line even arrives worker-rich and job-poor, the same imbalance from above, so your first move on it is to give the residents somewhere to ride.

When two lines' rings overlap, a shared building does not feed both. The nearer station takes it, and an exact distance tie splits it evenly. Nudge the building one cell toward either line and that line takes all of it.

Knowing a line has hit its cap tells you to grow elsewhere. What you grade against is in The operating ratio.