The Operating Ratio

The board grades your whole railway on a single number each period, and that same arithmetic is the one way you can lose the game outright.

What the board grades

The operating ratio is running cost divided by fare income. Lower is better. It is a ratio, not profit, and the distinction matters: building and shop spending are capital, so they never touch your grade. Only ongoing upkeep against ongoing fares is weighed.

The rule is simple. Beat the era's target (the figures in the era table in The railwayman's handbook) and you draw a dividend. Beat it clearly — ten points of ratio under the target — and the dividend doubles. Miss it and you get nothing. A year that earns zero fares but still owes upkeep is an automatic miss, because the ratio is then running cost over nothing.

The grade is aggregate. The board sums every line's upkeep over every line's fares and grades one figure for the whole empire, so a strong line can carry a weak one for a while, and a neglected one drags the lot down.

Why a frozen line slides into a miss

Network upkeep is not flat. The network share of your running costs — track, stations, buildings and scenery, summed across the whole empire — is raised to the power 1.15, which makes it super-linear: a sprawled empire pays more than the parts suggest and tidy compact lines are rewarded. (The flat office cost and the fuel for running seats stay linear; it is the network you lay that compounds.) On top of that sit the era multipliers, the permanent staircase of historic events that reaches roughly x3.6 by the 1970s (and climbs further afterward). The timeline that builds that figure is in The empire and the long century.

Put the two together and a railway that holds still is doomed. Its upkeep climbs with the staircase while its fares never inflate, so the ratio drifts the wrong way as the costs climb until a dividend turns into a miss. There are four cures, and each lives in its own chapter. Carry more people on the same ground (density). Match the train to the queue (throughput). Fold the line long and tight instead of letting it sprawl (geometry). And once the early line is sound, grow into more of them (the empire).

Debt, the overdraft, and bankruptcy

This is the only way you lose. The bank covers any shortfall as debt. Your credit limit starts at 500 and rises to about a tenth of your net worth. Bankruptcy fires only when debt passes 1.2 times that limit, which is 600 at the floor. Interest is marginal: 5% on the first band of the limit, 10% on the next, 20% across the rest of it, and a punishing 40% on anything past the ceiling.

Now the trap, the coast-bleed. A line whose upkeep outgrows its fares slides into debt on its own. Interest compounds, and the bank eventually forecloses. A bad ratio costs you the dividend, and if you let it run, the game. How fast depends entirely on the cushion you banked: a rich line bleeds slowly, an under-built one forecloses fast.

Borrowing to bootstrap a line that will earn is fine, even sensible, because the fares pay the debt back. It is fatal only when the borrowed coins buy dead assets that bill upkeep without raising fares: buildings beyond two cells of a platform, homes with no jobs to ride to, track stretched past the 26-cell cap, surplus stations. Debt against future fares is investment. Debt against dead weight is a countdown.

A developed line against a sprawled one

The contrast tells the whole story.

A developed line folds a long path into cheap ground, keeps a handful of well-fed stations, balances its homes against its workplaces, and runs a train sized to its queue. Its fares are large and its upkeep is lean, so its ratio sits under the target and it banks a dividend that buys the next line.

A sprawled or clustered line does the reverse. Homes sit next to their jobs on the minimum fare, stations carpet the board, buildings drift past the two-cell ring, and the train is too small or too big for any of it. Its fares are a trickle and its upkeep is heavy and super-linear, so its ratio drifts above the target, the shortfall becomes debt, and the bank closes in.

For the maps of each, side by side: a developed empire and a sprawled one.