Geometry, Land & Fares

A fare is mostly distance

A delivered passenger pays:

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

So the base fare is a modest 3 coins, but every cell of the trip adds 1 more, and freshness decays from full down to a 30% floor over 30 seconds of waiting. A long, well-planned trip is worth far more than a short hop.

But read that carefully, because it's the single most-misread idea in the game: the goal is a long trip, which is not the same as a long railway. You make a trip long by placing its two stations far apart — not by laying more track. Extra track is sprawl, and the board punishes it on a curve (see The Board & the Operating Ratio). Hold on to this one distinction — long trips, compact line — and most of the confusion about "build big vs. stay small" dissolves.

Trip distance is the shortest way around the loop, and it is capped at 26 cells. Two consequences fall straight out of that:

• Put your homes and your jobs directly across the loop from each other, so the shortest way between them is as long as the loop allows — that's top fare. (Why directly across, and not merely "a bit apart"? Because of how a loop is measured — see the next section.)
• Once your loop is big enough that the farthest stations are ~26 cells apart on the short side — roughly a 13–14-cell-per-side edge loop — making the loop bigger adds no extra fare.

The loop has two ways round — and you're billed the short one

This is the bit that trips up almost everyone: "It's a loop — so if the ride to work is short, the ride home is long. Doesn't it average out?" It does not. Your fare has nothing to do with the path the train physically rolls. It's the shorter of the two arcs between the boarding station and the destination — every time. Whichever way the engine happens to carry a passenger, the game pays you for the short way round.

So a house placed right next to its workplace earns the minimum fare, forever. Two stations one cell apart make a 1-cell trip — about 4 coins — even when the train loops that passenger nearly the whole way around to reach the platform. (And that rider then hogs a seat for almost a full lap to earn those 4 coins, so you lose on throughput too.)

To earn a big fare the two stations have to be far apart by the short arc — and on a ring, that means directly opposite each other, where the two arcs are roughly equal and each is about half the perimeter. That's exactly why the 26-cell cap pairs with a ~13–14-cell-per-side loop: half of its ~52-cell perimeter is 26. Homes at one end, jobs at the point across from them, and the shortest way between them is as long as the board allows.

And it's specifically the pair that trades — a home-station and the job-station its commuters ride to — that needs the distance, not every station from every other. Two home-stations sitting near each other are harmless (neither has local jobs, so there's no cheap short hop for their commuters to make). The real trap is putting homes and jobs together at one spot — that guarantees the short, worthless fare.

One big oval beats a clever maze

It's tempting to snake the track back and forth to cram in more stations and track. Don't. Three mechanics make a serpentine strictly worse than a simple oval:

1. The fare is already capped at 26 cells. Extra perimeter past that earns nothing.
2. One train, so income = laps × seats. A longer or twistier loop means a longer lap, which means fewer laps per period and less delivered — you're slowing your only train for no fare gain.
3. Every added station is a dwell stop and the priciest upkeep in the game, and every extra track cell adds upkeep on the 1.15-power curve.

So the right shape is a single simple loop, sized so its longest trips just reach the 26-cell fare cap, with a handful of well-spaced stations — not a maze stuffed with platforms. And by oval we mean a balanced, roughly square loop (~13–14 cells per side) — not a long thin sliver. A thin loop would have to stretch ~26 cells in one direction just to reach the fare cap, which runs straight off the edge of the 20-cell board; only a near-square loop reaches the cap on a board you can actually buy. Counter-intuitively, the move that feels like "more railway" (snaking to fit more stops) makes you less money.

Land is a real, escalating cost

You do buy land to grow the board, and it gets quadratically more expensive:

land cost = 40 + (columns + rows − 12)² × 3

So it starts cheap — a floor of 40 coins for the first squares past the 6×6 starter table — and climbs steeply, to about 2,400 near the 20×20 maximum. Land is the late-game income lever — longer trips pay more — and the campaign's main money sink, so it's a deliberate, well-timed investment, not something you fund from idle pocket change.

But mind the fare cap. Because trips top out at 26 cells, expanding the board past the point where your loop already hits that cap means you're paying the steepest land prices to lengthen a loop whose long trips no longer pay extra — while simultaneously slowing your one train. The board's sweet spot is roughly 13–14 cells per side; pushing to the 20×20 maximum is usually over-expansion.

The good-vs-bad geometry, side by side

Everything in this chapter and the last shows up when you put a well-built line next to a sprawled one — see it for yourself in Good Map vs Bad Map.