Stations, Trains & Throughput

Two facts shape every layout decision: a station is the most expensive piece in the game to run (0.9/period, against 0.7 a building, 0.15 a tree, 0.05 a plain track cell), and there is only ever one train on your loop. Everything below follows from those two.

How many stations does a city want?

More stations means more catchment coverage and more colours to trade between — but each one is costly to run, and the train must stop at every one, dragging your lap time down. So there's a sweet spot. Hold a fixed 40-worker city constant and vary only the station count, and it stands right out:

A fixed 40-worker city in 1950, one scaled train, station count varied.

The lesson reads both ways:

• Too few stations is a cliff. Two or three can't connect or serve the city — you run a loss.
• The sweet spot is a handful (~6–8 here), and it scales with city size — roughly one station per 6–8 workers.
• Over-stationing is a slow tax, not instant death: from 8 to 30 stations the margin drops ~25% and the ratio more than doubles (0.20 → 0.43). And that table doesn't even count the dwell-time you lose stopping at 30 platforms — in play, carpeting the board with stations is worse than the figures show.

Match stations to the city. Don't max them.

There is one train — so throughput is everything

You cannot buy a second locomotive. Your entire delivery capacity is that one consist, and it's set by three things you can buy:

• Extra Carriages — +2 seats each (base cost 80, super-linear ramp).
• Faster Train — +0.3× speed per level, up to ×3.4 (base 60, hard cap at level 8 — a model train at 4× stops being legible).
• The engine itself — Steam (free, ×1.0) → Diesel (160 coins, ×1.1, 3 coaches) → Express (320 coins, ×1.4, 4 coaches). Each tier is strictly better than the last.
• Bigger Stations — platform queue +2 per level, so a busy stop can hold a longer waiting crowd without turning fares away.

When passengers are piling up faster than the train clears them, the train is your bottleneck — not stations, not buildings. Take a saturated city (demand at the Modern cap of 200) with a fixed 6 stations, and change only the train:

A saturated 80-worker city in 1980, six stations fixed, train varied.

Same stations. Same demand. A 13× swing in income — purely from train capacity and speed. A starter train on a maxed-out city bleeds to death; a scaled Express on the identical line thrives. The classic distress signal — "I have tons of demand and my platforms are always full" — means exactly this: you're demand-saturated and throughput-starved. Buy the train.

Platforms hold the queue so fares don't go stale; the train clears it. And because the train stops at every station, fewer, well-placed stations also make the train lap faster — throughput and a tidy station count pull in the same direction.

Next, the shape of the line itself — and why one big oval beats a clever maze: Geometry, Land & Fares.