Fares, Distance & the Shape of a Line

A fare is mostly distance, and distance is the most misread thing in the game. Get it right and your fares outrun a century of rising costs. Get it wrong and a busy line still earns a pittance.

The fare formula

A delivered passenger pays:

fare = (3 + 1.0 x trip-distance-in-cells) x freshness

The base is a flat 3 coins, and every cell of the trip adds one more. Freshness decays from full toward a floor of 0.3 over about 30 seconds of waiting, so it never reaches nothing, but a long queue does cost you. Distance is the lever here, the thing that lets fares outrun a century of rising costs.

It is capped at 26 cells. A 1-cell trip pays about 4 coins, the 0-cell floor is 3, and a 26-cell trip pays 29. Once a line's trading stations sit 26 cells apart by the path, stretching it further adds no fare at all, only longer laps and more upkeep.

Distance is arc-length, not separation

Trip distance is the length of the path the train travels between the two trading stations, measured as arc-length, not the straight-line gap between them. On a closed loop the game takes the shorter of the two arcs around the ring. On an open shuttle there is one path, so it is simply the length of it. The route the train physically rolls is irrelevant to the fare. You are paid for the short arc.

So if two stations sit close along the track, the trip is short and the fare is small, however far apart they look on the table.

The short-arc trap

A home placed next to its workplace earns the minimum fare forever. This is the single biggest early income mistake, and it is invisible because the line still runs and still pays. It just pays a pittance.

Do the sum. A 1-cell trip pays about 4 coins. The same passenger on a 26-cell run pays 29, seven times more for one platform's effort, and nearly ten times against the bare 3-coin floor. A clustered home-next-to-factory line looks perfectly healthy while quietly earning a fraction of what it could. The fix is to put the homes and the jobs they ride to far apart along the path.

It is specifically the trading pair that needs the distance, a home-station and the job-station its commuters ride to. Two home-stations near each other are harmless, because neither has local jobs for the other's residents to make a cheap hop to. The trap is putting homes and jobs together at one spot, which guarantees the worthless short fare. Catchment and the worker-to-job balance behind all this are in Where fares come from.

Fold the line, don't stretch it

Distance is arc-length, so you buy it by making the path between two stations long. You can fold that path back on cheap ground. The train holds its pace through bends, since curves carry no speed penalty. Track is cheap, 0.05 upkeep per cell, while land is the expensive sink: buying board space costs about 40 coins near the table edge and climbs steeply past 2,000 as the board approaches its maximum, because the price grows faster than the size. A long serpentine reaches the 26-cell cap in a fraction of the footprint a big oval needs.

Loop versus shuttle settles the rest. A closed loop runs full speed both ways and is the stronger shape. An open shuttle reverses at half speed at each dead end, so it delivers fewer fares per period for the same distance. Prefer a folded, meandering loop. Use a shuttle only when land is tight, and watch that the longer lap does not starve throughput, in which case the train wants upgrading; see Stations, trains and throughput.

Growing land, and clawing it back

The board grows as you build, and your cells keep their full, legible size for as long as the layout fits the build volume. Push the footprint past what the volume can hold — a three-line empire will — and the whole board scales down evenly to stay in view: nothing is cropped and nothing moves, the table simply renders a little smaller. That growing room is the late-game income lever. It lets you stretch a line toward the 26-cell cap, then stop and densify.

When you need cash back or want to trim upkeep, demolishing any piece refunds 50% of its book value — for a station, that includes every platform upgrade you bought on it. One window changes that. During Beeching a closed station refunds its full value rather than half, while every station you keep carries a temporary surcharge. So it is the moment to prune dead platforms for free and cut back to a paying core. When that window falls, and the rest of the timeline, is in The empire and the long century. Why sprawl is punished at all is The operating ratio.

Each shape is its own sealed route; lines never link (see The empire and the long century).